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Add The New York Post on Google A couple of self-described “country hick” farmers blasted an AI company’s plan to build a data center on their Kentucky property after rejecting a whopping multimillion-dollar sum for their humble farmland.
Delsia Bare and her mother Ida Huddleston initially agreed to sell their plots in Maysville for a combined total of $26.4 million when initially approached by representatives of an unknown AI company, the Wall Street Journal reported.
But when the mother-daughter duo, a couple of self-described “country hicks,” learned that the company planned to build data centers on the land to power artificial intelligence bots, they swiftly backed out.
“Kick rocks and don’t come back,” Bare told the reps after she and her mom successfully canned the deal.
Bare said she’d decided to back out of the deal fearing she’d be “held accountable” by higher powers for selling the family farm just to have it replaced by an AI hub.
“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,” she told the outlet.
The deal from the anonymous business — believed to be connected to Meta, according to WSJ — stood to have the duo trade the land, which had been in the family for around 200 years, for the handsome payout well above market rate.
Bare was offered $48,000 per acre for 463 acres of land, while Huddleston stood to collect $60,000 a piece for 71 acres of land — totalling a combined $26.48 million, the two told the outlet.
Meta said no decision has been made about working in the area, in a statement to the Journal.
The fight over data centers continues to deeply divide the town, as many welcome the possible economic boon that it may provide and have already agreed to sell their land to the company for millions, the publication reported.
In addition to bucking the multimillion dollar deal, Bare and others in the town have also decided to file lawsuits challenging the construction of the centers in Maysville – including one that would take neighbors to court.
“Some of those people would have gone their entire lives without being brought into a courtroom,” Tyler McHugh, an economic development director who liaisons with the unnamed AI company, told the publication.
Bare, who is nearly blind, and Huddleston, who walks with a cane, are surprised by their unlikely position as stalwarts standing against the data center’s construction.
“I never thought I’d be in a battle with a data center,” Bare said. “I thought I was about as far out in the boondocks as you could get.”