Kentucky mother and daughter refuse $26 million offer for AI data center land

Judge dismisses one of two challenges as buyer stalls closings

MAYSVILLE, Ky. — Delsia Bare and her mother, Ida Huddleston, rejected a $26.48 million offer for their Kentucky farmland after learning the buyer planned to build a 2.2-gigawatt AI data center, a decision that has made the two women central figures in a fight dividing this town of 8,700 about 60 miles southeast of Cincinnati, according to a Wall Street Journal report.

The company sought 463 acres from Bare at $48,000 an acre and 71 acres from Huddleston at $60,000 an acre — collectively $26.48 million, nearly 10 times what the property might fetch on the open market. The women initially agreed to sell, then revoked the agreements once they learned the land would host a hyperscale data center. “Kick rocks and don’t come back,” Bare said she told the company’s representative.

The two self-described “country hicks” said their refusal turned on what the land means to a family that has farmed it for nearly 200 years. The property dates to a single purchase in 1848, and the homestead fed the family during the Great Depression and supplied timber for the main house.

Bare, 54, who said diabetes has left her nearly blind, described the decision in religious terms. “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. “If I step off of this piece of property and it becomes something for an AI hub, then I have failed to occupy and I can be held accountable for that on the Judgment hour.” Her mother, an 83-year-old widow who walks with a cane, said the money held no appeal. “Even if I had $26 million, I’d want to sit here in my chair, and have my coffee and eat my food where I always do,” Huddleston said.

The data center proposal has led to tensions in Maysville, according to the Wall Street Journal. Town meetings that still open with the Pledge of Allegiance now often end in insults, sisters have landed on opposite sides of the question, and local officials say they are legally barred from sharing what they know. OpenAI Chief Executive Sam Altman has called computing power “the currency of the future”; the company behind the Maysville project has approached residents seeking farmland to host the facility.

The company behind the project went unidentified for much of the process, a source of frustration in a town accustomed to knowing one another’s business. New evidence this month indicated the firm was Meta; a Meta spokesman said no decision has been made about working in the area. A public-records request surfaced hundreds of pages of land studies and applications filed by an LLC established for “Project Crisham,” whose contact — a fiduciary director in the greater Philadelphia area named Pamela Gregorski — has worked on several data-center projects later revealed to be Meta sites.

Last month, Bare and other opponents filed two lawsuits to amend a data-center ordinance the Mason County fiscal court approved in February and to reverse the rezoning, including one that required them to sue their own neighbors under a Kentucky statute. The legal uncertainty prompted the company to postpone closing its purchase agreements, holding back checks worth tens of millions of dollars to farmers who had expected a windfall, said Tyler McHugh, the region’s economic development director and the company’s liaison to the town. A judge on Friday dismissed one of the cases, which McHugh said he expects will let the process resume; the other, which includes the neighbors, 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,” McHugh said.

In one of the suits, opponents petitioned for a new judge, arguing the assigned judge posed a conflict of interest because his wife, the county clerk, takes minutes for the fiscal court and his nephew contributes to a pro-data-center Facebook group; a higher court granted the request and reassigned the case.

McHugh, 36, grew up in Maysville and joined the Maysville-Mason County Industrial Development Authority in April 2024. He said the company’s plan grew from an initial 700 acres to a potential hyperscale site spanning more than 2,000 acres, with agreements totaling $110 million payable if the data center is built. He said the company has indicated the site will create 400 full-time jobs and hundreds more in construction in a county with a working-age population of 11,000, that occupancy and property taxes would double or triple the Maysville town budget, and that it has pledged at least $15 million for police, ambulance and fire services plus an estimated $80 million upgrade to a water utility system that currently averages one water-main break a month.

“If you’re gonna ingratiate yourself into the community, the first steps are the biggest ones, so having someone reluctantly sell to you is not the way to go,” McHugh said.

McHugh said he believes the town splits roughly into thirds: 20% adamantly opposed, 20% adamantly in support, and 60% that “would like it to be done and dusted so they don’t have to hear about it anymore.” The opposition has formed a bipartisan coalition in a county that has voted for Republican presidential candidates in every election since 1984.

Janet Garrison, a retired information-technology instructor at the local community college, coordinates much of the opposition. She downloaded a hunting app to map the plots being acquired, helped staff an information booth at the county fair, and said she pressed for higher relocation pay for residents of a nearby mobile-home park — moving expenses rose from $20,000 to $50,000 within days of her calling local television stations. She ran for Mason County commissioner on an anti-data-center platform and lost by 75 votes out of 1,631 cast. On competing Facebook groups, opponents and backers trade insults; detractors call Garrison “Psycho Janet.”

“We wanted to be a part of this,” Garrison said. “But the NDAs…they just locked down and backed up.”

Supporters see the project as a rare economic opportunity in a town where one in four residents lives below the poverty line and median household income is about $39,000 — less than half the national figure and nearly 40% below Kentucky’s. Danielle Rees, who moved from Florida last year to buy the Thirsty Beaver bar across the street from the proposed site, said jobs paying more than $20 an hour are hard to find. Asked whether she would take a $26 million offer from an AI company, she said, “I’d say, hell yeah, and live instead of struggle.”

Bare said she opposes the project partly out of fear of the technology itself — “I believe artificial intelligence will be the destruction of the human race” — and acknowledged the central irony of her stand: refusing to sell does not guarantee the data center will not be built, and she could end up living beside one with no compensation. She noted she holds some 200 shares of Meta stock and said that if she met the company’s chief executive, she would “kick him in both shins.”

Bare said her refusal has drawn attention from farmers in other states facing similar offers, and that strangers approach her in public. “When I walk into a grocery store, I have strange men come up to me and just hug me, and I’m sure their wives are frying. They’re going, ‘We saw you on TV and you said no to that damn big money,’” she said.

She has cited the Bible’s Matthew 17:20 in explaining her resolve. “If you have the faith of a mustard seed and you tell that mountain over there to move, it will move,” she said. “It means that it is doable.”