'$26 Million Doesn’t Mean a Thing’: Farmer (Hero?) Who Rejected Data Center Buyout
For the past year, an unnamed Fortune 100 AI company has been making offers to cattle farmers Ida Huddleston and her daughter, Delsia, to buy a portion of their 1,200-acre property for $26 million to develop a data center. The women have continuously rejected the offers, saying, “$26 million doesn’t mean a thing.” Agreed. Millions of dollars is one thing, but denying AI big shots the pleasure of thinking they can buy up our lives? That’s priceless.
“My grandfather and great-grandfather and a whole bunch of family have all lived here for years, paid taxes on it, fed a nation off of it,” she told Cincinnati’s Local 12. “Even raised wheat through the Depression and kept bread lines up in the United States of America when people didn’t have anything else.”
The family is one of dozens of landowners in the area being bought out of their farmland to make way for resource-hungry data centers. These companies are specifically targeting the Midwest for its cooler temperatures and proximity to the Great Lakes, a resource needed for cooling. Because who cares about our country’s natural wonders? Or our world’s diminishing water supply? However much water Trump needs to power his AI slop, he gets.
“They call us old, stupid farmers, you know, but we’re not,” Huddleston said. “We know whenever our food is disappearing, our lands are disappearing, and we don’t have any water, and that poison. Well, we know we’ve had it.” Poison here could mean anything from contaminated water to greenhouse gas emissions, but data centers are poison in the spiritual sense, nonetheless.
It gives me hope that people refuse to let the land be transformed into giant warehouses for AI, which drive up power bills and poison the water of people living in surrounding communities. Not that the companies would care about actual people, obviously.
Ida, who is 82, said she doesn’t need the money and plans to die on the land, which is why Ida Huddleston is our choice for Badass of the Week. Good job, ladies.
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