A mother and daughter in Maysville, Kentucky, walked away from a combined $26.48 million offer for their family farmland after learning the buyer planned to build a massive AI data center on it.
The Wall Street Journal reports that the offer arrived just over a year ago. An unknown company was buying up Kentucky farmland, and it wanted 463 acres from Delsia Bare at $48,000 per acre and 71 acres from her mother, Ida Huddleston, at $60,000 per acre. At first the women agreed to sell. Then they learned the land their family had farmed for nearly 200 years would host a data center, and their answer changed to no.
“Kick rocks and don’t come back,” Bare told the company’s representative after successfully revoking the agreements. She and her mother, self-described “country hicks,” have since become polarizing figures in the rural fight against AI infrastructure. Bare, 54, is nearly blind from diabetes. Huddleston is an 83-year-old churchgoing widow who walks with a cane. “One of us is blind and the other’s cripple,” said Huddleston.
The family’s land, first purchased in 1848, fed them through the Great Depression. Bare grounds her refusal in faith. “What I believe in is something called Jesus Christ, and he said to occupy, wherever you’re standing, you occupy until he returns,” she said. She also said, “I believe artificial intelligence will be the destruction of the human race.”
Last month, Bare and other opponents filed two lawsuits challenging a February county ordinance on data centers and the rezoning behind it. A Kentucky statute required them to sue the neighbors who had authorized the rezoning. A judge dismissed one case on Friday, which McHugh expects will restart the purchase process; the other remains ongoing. “Some of those people would have gone their entire lives without being brought into a courtroom, let alone being sued by a neighbor who lives 3 miles down the street,” he said. Bare acknowledged the cost: “Now everybody’s mad at me.”
McHugh let Bare and Huddleston out of their deals, telling the company afterward, and said its representatives told him they would have also canceled the contracts, since reluctant sellers made for poor community relations. Several neighbors did sell for millions, while others refused, forming a bipartisan opposition in a county that has voted Republican in every presidential election since 1984. McHugh estimates 20 percent of residents adamantly oppose the project, 20 percent support it, and 60 percent “would like it to be done and dusted so they don’t have to hear about it anymore.”
Janet Garrison, a retired community college IT instructor, maps the acquired plots with a hunting app, ran an information booth at the local fair, and pressed a mobile-home park owner to raise moving expenses for displaced renters from $20,000 to $50,000. She recently lost a run for Mason County commissioner by 75 votes of 1,631 cast. “We wanted to be a part of this,” she said. “But the NDAs…they just locked down and backed up.”
Support comes from places like D’s Thirsty Beaver, a bar directly across from the proposed site. Owner Danielle Rees, a Florida transplant with 12 children, is training staff for 6:00 a.m. shifts in anticipation of construction crews. She points to a town where one in four residents lives below the poverty line and median household income is about $39,000. Of the $26 million offer, she said, “I’d say, hell yeah, and live instead of struggle.”
Bare knows refusing to sell may not stop the data center from being built near her. She keeps roughly 200 shares of Meta stock, tends her flower beds despite her failing sight, and said that if she met Mark Zuckerberg she would “kick him in both shins.” Strangers now hug her in grocery stores, and farmers nationwide call for advice.
She stated: “On the Judgment Day, I’m only called to account for what I was supposed to be responsible for. That’s the only way it can go on Judgment Day. What were you responsible for?”
Finding the balance between AI’s potential benefits and its landmines, such as Silicon Valley’s approach of building data centers pushed through local government with NDAs, is crucial for all conservatives. Breitbart News social media director Wynton Hall has written his instant bestseller Code Red: The Left, the Right, China, and the Race to Control AI to serve as the definitive guide on how the MAGA movement can create positions on AI that benefit humanity without handing control of our nation to the leftists of Silicon Valley or allowing the Chinese to take over the world.
Read more at the Wall Street Journal here.
Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of AI, free speech, and online censorship.