US farmers are rejecting multimillion-dollar datacenter bids for their land: 'I'm not for sale'

[douglas9]

When two men knocked on Ida Huddleston’s door last May, they carried a contract worth more than $33m in exchange for the Kentucky farm that had fed her family for centuries.

According to Huddleston, the men’s client, an unnamed “Fortune 100 company”, sought her 650 acres (260 hectares) in Mason county for an unspecified industrial development. Finding out any more would require signing a non-disclosure agreement.

More than a dozen of her neighbors received the same knock. Searching public records for answers, they discovered that a new customer had applied for a 2.2 gigawatt project from the local power plant, nearly double its annual generation capacity.

The unknown company was building a datacenter.

“You don’t have enough to buy me out. I’m not for sale. Leave me alone, I’m satisfied,” Huddleston, 82, later told the men.

As tech companies race to build the massive datacenters needed to power artificial intelligence across the US and the world, bids like the one for Huddleston’s land are appearing on rural doorsteps nationwide. Globally, 40,000 acres of powered land – real estate prepped for datacenter development – are projected to be needed for new projects over the next five years, double the amount currently in use.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/feb/21/us-farmers-datacenters

[rampartd]

1. 3 new amazon data centers approved for louisiana

why do they need so many of these data centers?

why do they use so much electricity?

how do i vote against these corporations having so much of my data?

[OC375]

2. Growth in Perpetuity

Companies are valued on potential now, not actual product or results. To create value in that landscape like that, which also demands shareholder quarter over quarter gains in perpetuity,, you need more potential. That means more data centers. More. More. More. Beyond facilities these companies contribute little to life, so you build more centers for more profit.

We have IRAs and pensions to fund. This is about investors, not AI or curing cancer.

[jfz9580m]

3. K&R

I am all for making life as difficult for any ai company that isn’t upto the trustworthiness of Prof Yan Lecun, Timnit Gebru/DAIR and Emily Bender. I largely do not trust the field to be honest about the science or its utility for or impact on most of us/earth.

I like how Prof Lecun thinks. He thinks and sounds like an actual scientist. Given the sorry state of education, at this point I think all of society needs a crash course in scam detection.

Because people need to develop a gut instinct for sciences and scientists when they don’t understand complex sciences that affect their lives so as to be able to tell apart real things that will affect their lives (climate change and its cascading effects, including refugee crises roiling up an already tense and on edge reality..like unless the plan is pure divide and rule, non action on climate change will exacerabte the issues global migration is causing that hit everyone badly except creepy billionaires) versus purely made up bs whether it is Ai hype (that Altman type) or Ai “safety” (anything elon musk, eliezer kudkowsky, effective altruism, Max Tegmark and other bullshitters).

I at least see a divide from my vantage point in science and am abandoning extremely formal and bogus debates that keep handing me my ass from all directions (outside regular science which cannot be messed with)..but I can fling random shit around as proficiently as anyone where it is some vague drivel used to justify lots of systemic overreaches..


Apparently it is okay to just randomly change shit and bullshit and strand people in drivel..I will also start randomly throwing shit around as Trump does outside all of my formal responsibilities and see how that goes. I am not running for office or an influencer or media personality. I am..a..a..an eccentric! A nut!

I have noticed to my great chagrin over the years that President Trump, ChatGPT and I think similarly and so far it seems to be working out way better for President Trump and ChatGPT than me.

Maybe instead of being ashamed of it and trying to control it as a normal, responsible human being would, I should also fly by my pants and say random drivel with pride! At least my rough shots are closer to any ballpark sanity in any non-celluloid reality than Trump or GPT. Hah..Take that you fancy pants eggheads with your “scientific methods”..me, ChatGPT and President Trump are not going to play by your rules..we are authentic!

At least it is the best defense of publicly funded natural sciences that most average science labs I would contact would take one horrified look at me and run for the hills whereas the other two are feted in their respective trails of devastation..