US farmers refuse multimillion-dollar data-centre land offers

A wave of data-centre developers has been offering rural landowners eye-watering sums—tens of millions of dollars in some cases—only to be told no. Ars Technica reports that an 82-year-old Kentucky landowner, Ida Huddleston, rejected a $33 million offer for 650 acres after being asked to sign a non-disclosure agreement merely to learn who the buyer was and what the land would become. In Wisconsin, farmer Anthony Barta told reporters he worried less about the cheque than about what a neighbouring facility would do to farms that depend on quiet, water access and predictable local conditions.

The refusals land on a sector that has treated geography as a spreadsheet problem: find cheap power, permissive zoning and “abundant water,” then scale. Hines Research has estimated that global data-centre growth could require roughly 40,000 acres over the next five years, while demand for data-centre capacity tied to AI workloads is projected to surge sharply by 2030, according to figures cited by Ars Technica. But land is not a commodity in the way server racks are. A farm is also a home, an intergenerational asset and, in many counties, the backbone of the tax base and local employment.

The economic friction sits in the gap between who captures the upside and who absorbs the costs. A hyperscale facility can bring construction jobs and some property-tax revenue, but it can also impose non-trivial externalities: noise from cooling systems, heavy truck traffic, large water withdrawals, and—most consequentially—new demand for grid connections that may require upgrades. Those upgrades are often socialised through regulated utility rates or public infrastructure spending, while the most valuable output (compute) is sold into national or global markets.

Developers appear to be discovering that “just pay more” stops working when the transaction changes the surrounding land’s use value. Even a farmer willing to sell may face neighbours who cannot: a facility next door can change the viability of livestock operations, hunting land, or future agricultural investment. That dynamic turns a private negotiation into a collective-action problem, and in practice it invites politics—county boards, zoning fights, moratoria, and lawsuits.

Some landowners are responding by locking land away from development altogether. Ars Technica describes an 86-year-old former dairy farmer in Pennsylvania, Mervin Raudabaugh Jr, who used a farmland-preservation programme funded by taxpayers to prevent developers from buying two contiguous farms, accepting about one-eighth of the private offers in exchange for permanent restrictions.

The industry’s demand curve is rising; the supply of socially acceptable sites is not. In several counties, the first negotiation is no longer about price per acre, but about who gets to decide what local resources are for.

Huddleston ultimately learned about the planned data centre by searching public records after refusing to sign an NDA. The offer was $33 million; the information was withheld.