Family rejects $26M from AI company to keep farmland from being turned into a data center
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MAYSVILLE, Ky. (WXIX/Gray News) — A Northern Kentucky family is standing firm by turning down $26 million to keep its farmland out of a developer’s hands.
The Huddleston family has worked on its 1,200-acre plot of land in Mason County for generations, raising cattle that end up on dinner tables across the region.
But now, a Fortune 100 company wants a portion of it in a fight that could reshape the future of farmland across Kentucky.
Last April, Delsia Bare said an undisclosed company approached her family, offering $26 million for roughly 900 acres to build a massive data center campus just outside Maysville city limits.
“The heartbreak that it [the land] could be gone is the first thing I feel. Literally a pain in the chest right there where the heart’s at,” Bare said.
For Delsia’s mother, Ida Huddleston, the answer was simple.
“I said, ‘No, mine is priceless.’ What I’ve got here, I want to pass it down. What God told me to do was to keep it until I was through with it and then pass it on to the next generation,” Huddleston said.
The project would rezone 28 properties — more than 2,000 acres total.
Maysville City Manager Matt Wallingford said the name of the company that wants to buy the land is confidential, but the impact would be huge.
“It’s a big deal for us,” he said.
Wallingford said the project would bring more than 1,000 construction jobs over eight to 10 years and more than 100 full-time positions averaging $100,000 a year.
He said a state tariff requires the company to fund a second power plant at no cost to taxpayers or ratepayers.
“I know it is a lot, but I know the state of Kentucky has passed a tariff requiring the project to pay for all of the power — that means building a second power plant equivalent to the one we have now — no cost to taxpayers. There will be no rate increase to those who receive electricity from RECC,” Wallingford said.
But for the Huddleston family, it’s not about the money. It’s about the impact on the water systems, overloading the power grid and permanently destroying fertile land for agriculture.
“I would agree with that,” Wallingford said. “But it doesn’t mean that the buildings can’t be reutilized with that infrastructure there. Our industrial authority would be recruiting a new business to come in, so I think that land will be valuable whether that data center is there.”
Wallingford said the data center would use a closed-loop water system to reduce the risk of contamination, and the solid waste the center would produce would be no more than that from a Kroger or another existing factory.
But Ida Huddleston said her late husband built her home, and she intends to die in it.
“He’s here all the time right with me and tells me what I’m going to have to do with the farm the next day and the next day, just like he would like it to be. He was something else,” she said.
She and Bare both said no amount of money changes that. They will continue fighting the data center.
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