Farm owners issue blunt response as they turn down $26 million to stop AI company building data centre on family land
A mother and daughter from Kentucky had a blunt response after being offered a staggering $26 million from developers to buy their land to build a data centre on.
Ida Huddleston, 82, and her daughter Delsia Bare, 54, own neighbouring farm plots in Maysville.
The land had been in the family for around 200 years, the Wall Street Journal reports.
In May last year, an unknown AI company reached out to the mother and daughter to ask if they’d be willing to sell their land.
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And the company was happy to part with big bucks to get its hand on the land.
Bare told the Wall Street Journal she had been offered $48,000 per acre for her 463 acres of land, while mum Huddleston was offered $60,000 per acre for 71 acres of land, meaning the pair stood to earn a combined $26.48 million.
The two women initially agreed to the deal from the anonymous business but say that when they found out it would be used to build a data centre they had a sharp change of mind.
“Kick rocks and don’t come back,” Bare said she told the company’s representatives.
“What I believe in is something called Jesus Christ, and he said to occupy, wherever you’re standing, you occupy until he returns," she told WSJ.
"If I step off of this piece of property and it becomes something for an AI hub, then I have failed to occupy and I can be held accountable for that on the Judgment hour."
Speaking to The Guardian earlier this year, Bare’s mum said she told the reps: “You don’t have enough to buy me out. I’m not for sale. Leave me alone, I’m satisfied.”
Bare backed what her mum said, adding that ‘$26 million doesn’t mean anything’, and claiming the family would much prefer to ‘hold and feed a nation’.
“My grandfather and great-grandfather and a whole bunch of family have all lived here for years, paid taxes on it, fed a nation off of it,” Bare told WKRC.
Their decision not to sell up has sparked an international debate and saw them hailed as heroes by some.
But for the self-professed ‘country hicks’ the whole thing has left them somewhat baffled.
“I never thought I’d be in a battle with a data center,” Bare told WSJ.
“I thought I was about as far out in the boondocks as you could get.”
Other neighbours accepted big offers from the company, the Daily Mail reports.
However, others sided with the mother and daughter and refused to sell up.
Neighbour Dr Timothy Grosser, 75, also rejected an offer on his land.
He told The Guardian he was offered an impressive $8 million for his 250-acre farm and when he turned it down was hit with a counter-offer where he was allegedly told to ‘name his price’ but he held firm and told the mystery company that isn’t one.
Bare says she believes ‘artificial intelligence will be the destruction of the human race’ and has so-signed a lawsuit seeking to stop the data centre from being built and says she and her mum will fight it all the way.
Claire Reid