Kentucky family turns down AI company's $26 million offer for farm to build data center

A family in the US state of Kentucky received an offer that seemed impossible to refuse: a major AI company was ready to pay $26 million for the right to build a data center on their farm. The family said no, and the story quickly spread through the media as a symbol of resistance to the tech boom sweeping rural America.

The details of the deal remain private. Neither the company's name nor the exact location of the farm has been made public. All that is known is that the family owns a plot of land ideally suited to infrastructure needs: enough acreage, reliable access to the power grid and, likely, proximity to water resources, without which cooling thousands of server racks is simply impossible. Notably, the company was ready to offer that sum without public bidding, which suggests it needed this particular site.

The story comes amid a large-scale race that gets far less attention in public than the language models and chatbots themselves: the race for land. The biggest tech companies, including Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Meta* and others, have announced data center investments totaling hundreds of billions of dollars over the next few years. The physical infrastructure for training and running AI requires huge tracts of land, a stable power supply and access to water to cool equipment.

Agricultural regions are among the most attractive targets: low population density, fewer construction restrictions, affordable electricity prices and distance from expensive urban development. Companies are actively buying land in Virginia, Iowa, Texas, Ohio and other states. According to analysts' forecasts, facilities with a combined capacity of tens of gigawatts are planned to come online in the US alone by 2030, which means thousands of new data centers across the country.

Offers to landowners often exceed the market value of the plots several times over. $26 million is enough to provide for several generations of a family. Even so, the refusal raises a broader question: what exactly do local communities lose when they agree to such deals?

Critics of tech expansion point out that data centers consume enormous amounts of water and electricity, with some facilities requiring millions of liters a day. They also create relatively few permanent jobs for local residents and irreversibly change the character of the area. Farmland converted into an industrial site cannot be turned back into farmland.

On the other hand, supporters of putting tech infrastructure in rural areas point to tax revenue for municipal budgets, temporary construction jobs and investment in local infrastructure: roads, power grids, broadband internet. A number of US states are deliberately cutting taxes and simplifying approval procedures to attract large companies. For struggling rural districts, a data center can become one of the few sources of steady tax revenue.

The Kentucky family's story is not the first of its kind, and it certainly will not be the last. As the AI industry expands its demand for computing capacity, pressure on landowners will only increase. The question of who decides, and on what terms, what gets built next to a farm or a village is becoming more and more political. Several states are already discussing legislation to regulate where digital infrastructure can be placed, including distance requirements from residential areas, caps on water use and mandatory public hearings.

Turning down $26 million is not just one farming family's private decision. It is a reminder that behind every query to a language model there are physical facilities, real land and real people, none of whom were asked whether they want to live next door to server halls.

*Meta is designated an extremist organization and banned in Russia.