Some hicks won't sell and might run it for everybody?

As usual the WSJ doesn't provide any context for this story. Slackers. That's why you have me and my trust sidekick Claude (see additional analysis after the story).

These two whack jobs, represent about 24% of the 2,000 acres needed to build the data center. It's unclear how many of their neighbors want to sell, but it appears the majority do. Whether these ladies end up ruining it for everyone or the buyer decides to build on a slightly smaller scale is anybodies guess.

I support their right to be a "pain in the ass". It's the American way.

The ‘Country Hicks’ Who Refused $26 Million from an AI Data Center

A Kentucky mother and daughter turned down a life-changing offer for their farmland. The ensuing drama has left the town divided.

Delsia Bare and her mother, Ida Huddleston, in front of the family land.

By Erich Schwartzel, WSJ

Aug. 15, 2026 9:00 pm ET

Delsia Bare and her mother, Ida Huddleston, rejected a $26.48 million offer for their Kentucky farmland from a company that wanted to build an AI data center.

MAYSVILLE, Ky.—The offer arrived out of nowhere just over one year ago.

An unknown company was scooping up Kentucky farmland, and few plots were more valuable than those owned by Delsia Bare and her mother, Ida Huddleston.

The money would be life-changing. From Bare’s farm, the company wanted 463 acres at $48,000 apiece. From Huddleston’s nearby piece of property, it sought 71 at $60,000 per acre.

Together mother and daughter would collect $26.48 million. All they had to do was sign.

At first the women agreed. Then they discovered what their farmland—the farmland that their family had cultivated for nearly 200 years—would be used for: a 2.2-gigawatt hyperscale data center. That information turned their answer into an easy one.

No.

“Kick rocks and don’t come back,” Bare told the representative, after successfully revoking the agreements.

Since that $26 million refusal, Bare and Huddleston, two self-described “country hicks,” have become polarizing heroes of the rural campaign against the AI technology rewiring geopolitics, the economy—and now hometowns like theirs.

If computing power is, as OpenAI Chief Executive Sam Altman has said, “the currency of the future,” then communities like Maysville (population: 8,700) are being asked to serve as the reserves. The industry’s arrival has brought overnight changes—in some cases, boosted tax bases and multimillion-dollar payouts for landowners, but also fears about costs, water usage, noise and, in Maysville, allowing in an unknown piece of the future.

“I never thought I’d be in a battle with a data center,” said Bare. “I thought I was about as far out in the boondocks as you could get.”

Huddleston sits in her favorite recliner next to her daughter in the home her husband built.

She and her mother are unlikely Silicon Valley adversaries. Bare, 54 years old, is God-fearing and transgressive, often in the same breath, with domestic trouble in her past. Diabetes has left her nearly blind. She calls cows to breakfast with a holler, extemporizes on the Bible in full paragraphs and keeps a collection of high-vibration crystals. Her mother is an 83-year-old churchgoing widow who walks with a cane.

“One of us is blind and the other’s cripple,” said Huddleston.

Their homestead fed the family during the Great Depression and supplied the timber to build the main home. The AI company’s offers valued their acreage at nearly 10 times what they could expect to fetch on the open market, but that shrivels against this personal mathematical formulation: Delsia Bare values her land more than anything else on Earth.

“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.”

In Maysville, some 60 miles southeast of Cincinnati, the data center has frayed the social fabric. Town meetings still start with the Pledge of Allegiance but often end in insults. Sisters have found themselves on opposite sides of the issue. And local officials who normally update constituents on the sideline of a football game now say they are legally barred from sharing what they know.

The identity of the company eyeing the data center has been unknown, but new evidence this month indicated the firm behind it was Meta. A Meta spokesman said no decision has been made about working in the area.

That’s in part because last month, Bare and other opponents filed two lawsuits challenging the data center, including one that required they sue their own neighbors. The legal uncertainty prompted the company to postpone closing its purchase agreements, holding back checks worth tens of millions of dollars to Maysville farmers who’d expected a windfall by now, said Tyler McHugh, the region’s economic development director and the company’s ambassador to Maysville.

A judge on Friday dismissed one of the cases, which McHugh expects will resume the process. The other case, which includes the neighbors being sued, 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,” he said.

Said Bare: “Now everybody’s mad at me.”

Sitting in matching recliners earlier this summer, she and her mother explained that they once had a quiet life. Huddleston likes to get her hair permed and, according to her daughter, “remember what it was like when Dad was here.”

“Even if I had $26 million,” said Huddleston, “I’d want to sit here in my chair, and have my coffee and eat my food where I always do.”

Bare has spent the past year caring for detached retinas caused by her diabetes, but she still tends her flower beds and manages her considerable financial portfolio—which she said includes some 200 shares in Meta, an irony not lost on her. Still, she said, if she met Mark Zuckerberg, she would “kick him in both shins.”

Some of Maysville’s oldest families are like Bare and Huddleston, living on hundreds of acres—far away, some neighbors believe, from the minimum-wage gigs and night shifts of working-class life. Bare’s battle looks to these folks like a fight against their town’s chance at a better future.

Outside of the Huddleston family home, a “Don’t Tread on Me” flag rustled in the yard next to a DirecTV satellite dish. As Bare sat inside, a small, muted TV played Newsmax footage of President Trump’s recent trip to China. Later that same week, one report after another would affirm AI’s march of market dominance. Anthropic revenue surged. OpenAI readied a public offering. Elon Musk envisioned data centers floating through space.

Bare had Matthew 17:20 on her mind.

“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.”

Bare walks carefully through the yard of her home.

Bare walks carefully through the yard of her home, where she manages several hundred acres of inherited farmland.

The family farm

All Bare ever knew to be was a cowgirl.

“I took off on a horse at 11 years old when my daddy bought me my first one,” she said.

She named it Rebel. Bare rode Rebel across property still full of arrowheads left behind by Cherokee and Shawnee tribes, hundreds of acres of Huddleston family farmland that started with a single purchase in 1848.

When the Civil War broke out, the area revealed itself to be “a border county in a border state,” as the local historical museum puts it. The split was geographical and, in some cases, familial. Brothers fought against brothers.

Bare’s grandfather bought a home on the property that she inherited when she was only 4 years old. Her father, Bill Huddleston, oversaw the farming of cattle, hay, tobacco and other crops, and built the home where her mother still lives.

Bill didn’t care if Bare did her actual homework, she remembers, so long as she could tell him which companies paid a dividend. Bare still reflexively recites stock tickers out loud when companies are mentioned.

She moved into her grandfather’s empty house with her first husband, whom she married at 17 years old and later divorced. She met her second husband at church, after he marched up to her and announced, “My name’s Mike Scott and I’m an asshole.”

“That’s good to know,” she told him. “My name’s Delsia and I’m an asshole too.”

They had a son. After Scott, a Vietnam War veteran, died in August 2013 at age 58, Bare scattered his ashes on her property. His death started a trying few years: Her father died that October. Rebel died the following year at 33.

“I had the horse longer than I had the husband,” she said.

Bare’s son lived with her until 2016, when she was charged with abuse and neglect. She described it as a disagreement with the law over corporal punishment and pleaded guilty, saying she worried that fighting the charge in a trial risked jailtime, and she feared that might mean the property could be taken from her family. Kentucky seals records in such cases.

She agreed to let her son live with her nephew. Bare hasn’t seen him in years, and lives by herself.

When the data center issue first flared up last year, Bare was in the hospital with a severe spinal infection, fielding worried updates from her mother.

“I was like, ‘Goddamn it, they ain’t gonna let me die in peace. I just might as well get the f— up,’” she remembered.

She and her mother had been approached by the Maysville-Mason County Industrial Development Authority, where its director, McHugh, was acquiring land on behalf of an unknown company planning an unspecified project. Bare at least wanted to know if the company was based in the U.S., or an A-rated stock. No answers.

Bare and Huddleston initially agreed to their offers, saying they assumed the buyer would invoke eminent domain and take the land regardless of what they signed, something that had already happened during the construction of a highway and two landfills.

In July 2025, residents learned that it would be a gargantuan data center. Handing over her land to help power the AI boom was one thing Bare could not abide.

“I believe artificial intelligence will be the destruction of the human race,” she said.

Her mother, meanwhile, was particularly incensed with a codicil of the deal found at the top of its seventh page, instructing her not to share any information “orally or in writing to any other entity or person,” according to a copy reviewed by the Journal.

Ida Huddleston holds the original offer for the purchase of her land.

Huddleston holds the original offer for the purchase of some of her land.

She wasn’t the kind to keep secrets from her neighbors. She started inviting them to compare their offers.

Bare successfully got both deals revoked, arguing that she and her mother had signed with an incomplete picture of the buyer’s plans. McHugh let them out and then told the company of his decision, and said its representatives told him they would have also canceled the contracts. The company could find the land elsewhere, and community relations were on its mind.

“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,” he said.

Several of Bare’s neighbors agreed to sell their land for millions of dollars, but others refused. An opposition movement formed, a bipartisan coalition in a county that has voted Republican in every presidential election since 1984.

It’s hard to say how Maysville writ large feels about the data center, but McHugh believes the town splits this way: 20% are adamantly opposed, 20% are adamantly in support, and the remaining 60% “would like it to be done and dusted so they don’t have to hear about it anymore.”

At 36 years old, McHugh is exactly the kind of young professional that Maysville wants back. He grew up here and attended the University of Kentucky, but when he married and started raising a family, he had to drive 90 minutes to Cincinnati for work at Procter & Gamble. He quit and joined the development authority in April 2024.

He had his work cut out for him. Wages haven’t kept up with inflation in his hometown. A high-school class of 200 might see 30 graduates stick around. Corporate sponsors for scholarships had dried up.

“I thought I’d be working with Chick-fil-A’s and Dollar Generals,” he said.

But it was only months after taking the new job that he heard from an AI company, which initially described a project covering 700 acres. Then McHugh says the plan became a potential hyperscale site covering more than 2,000 acres—bigger than two Central Parks. The company asked McHugh, a familiar face in Maysville, to serve as their liaison and secure the extra acreage. Agreements totaling $110 million followed, payable if the data center is built.

From McHugh’s perspective, the data center solves several of the area’s collective problems, too.

The company has indicated the site will create 400 full-time jobs and hundreds more in construction—a surge in a county with a working-age population of 11,000, McHugh said. The occupancy and property taxes would double or triple the Maysville town budget. The company also agreed to give the city at least $15 million for police, ambulance and fire services, and to fund an estimated $80 million upgrade for a water utility system currently averaging one water-main break per month. Critics of the plan want these pledges in writing, and McHugh said they are currently being formalized.

McHugh’s pitch has been complicated by the fact that he can’t reveal who he is working with. The nondisclosure agreement he signed is required by most data-center builders, and the practice is often cited as the most frustrating part of the process—especially for residents accustomed to living in a town where everyone knows one another’s business.

Local officials have tried to assure residents that they are dealing with a major player in AI, not a fly-by-night operator.

Residents spent months piecing together the rumors and clues that float through a small town. One local official said the builder is among the 10 biggest companies in the world. A Maysville woman traveling with her husband on a work trip coincidentally met a man who said he’d been in the area on behalf of Meta.

A public-records request yielded clearer evidence: hundreds of pages of land studies and applications filed by an LLC established for “Project Crisham.” The contact for that LLC, a fiduciary director in the greater Philadelphia area named Pamela Gregorski, has worked on several data-center projects that were later revealed to be Meta sites.

With little information at hand, Bare and her neighbors have coordinated their research.

Janet Garrison, a dirt-bike-riding grandmother who taught information technology at the local community college, downloaded an app used by hunters to map the plots being acquired. She and others set up an information booth at the local fair.

When Garrison first learned of the data center, she thought of her former students and the jobs it might bring. Soon the opaque process irked her.

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

Garrison now spends much of her retirement coordinating the opposition’s efforts. When the owner of a nearby mobile-home park sold his land, he told his renters they had to leave, and that each would receive $20,000 in moving expenses. Garrison called local TV stations and set up interviews with sick senior citizens who live in the park. Within days, the moving expenses were upped to $50,000. She recently ran for Mason County commissioner on an anti-data center platform and lost by 75 votes (a total of 1,631 were cast).

Both sides hash it out at meetings of the fiscal court of Mason County, the primary government body overseeing the development. In February, it approved an ordinance for data centers with requirements that included decibel limits and buffer zones from certain properties.

Bare and other opponents escalated their fight soon after, filing two suits to amend the ordinance and reverse the rezoning. A Kentucky statute required they sue those who had given authority for the rezoning: their own neighbors.

The interconnectedness of the small town has led to other complications. In one of the suits, Bare’s side petitioned for a new judge because the first one posed a conflict of interest, they argued, since 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 ruled in their favor and reassigned the case to another district.

The dispute has gotten nasty, mostly through posts on competing Facebook groups. Garrison is called “Psycho Janet.” Bare’s child-abuse charges are cited when her name comes up.

Strangers stop McHugh on the street just to ask how he’s holding up. He’s been accused of bringing to Maysville the mark of the beast.

“I serve on the parish council,” he said. “I’m not a Wiccan or anything like that.”

Down the street at D’s Thirsty Beaver bar, Danielle Rees is doing a test run on serving breakfast. Her bar is directly across the street from the field where the data center is supposed to go, and she wants her staff comfortable with 6 a.m. shifts if the construction crews start showing up.

Rees moved to Maysville last year from Florida, after driving through the area and deciding on a lark to see if there were any bars for sale. There was: the Thirsty Beaver on Germantown Road, a biker bar with a stuffed beaver stationed at the front door.

On her first Friday night, there were five people there. Now she has a fire chief routinely stopping by to make sure she’s not going over capacity—a boost she attributes in part to reversing an unofficial “whites only” policy at the bar.

Rees sees a data center as a catalyst, one that could produce jobs that folks in Maysville can’t envision yet. The opposition movement, she believes, fails to notice the hardship she sees at the bar—the women waiting for a spot at the shelter, or the regulars stretching a drink since their homes are empty.

In her view, farmers who don’t want a data center might not appreciate that family farms become family inheritances. For those who aren’t working on one, it can be tough to find a job in Maysville that pays more than $20 an hour, or one that allows you to be home for meals with your family. When Rees hears of the mobile-home park being relocated, she thinks of the landlord who gets to retire with a windfall after chasing rent for years.

One in four Maysville residents is living below the poverty line, and the median household income is about $39,000—less than half the national figure and nearly 40% below the state’s.

Rees herself has 12 kids, and on a recent afternoon, eight of them were drinking sodas at the bar and entertaining themselves with board games, so Rees could spend time with them and run her business while her husband, a transient oil-field worker, was away. There wasn’t a smartphone in sight—Rees says she hates technology and has home-schooled her children since learning how reliant schools had become on screens.

But if she were offered $26 million by an AI company, she said, “I’d say, hell yeah, and live instead of struggle.”

At the bar, a regular named John was having a drink and working through a pack of Marlboro Reds. When the topic turned to the data center, he yelled, “You ever hear of Chernobyl?!”

She asked him where he learned about these supposed data-center dangers. His phone, he said.

“I like hearing my birds sing,” he said. “They’re going to be gone.”

Rees told him that any concerns about data-center noise were overblown—the music in her bar is way louder and the cops are never called, she said.

If anything, the fight has shown the neighbors of Maysville just how unavoidable AI has become. Fake AI versions of Bare circulate on social media, asking for donations. A musician inspired by her story is working on an album of songs about it, but admitted he used AI to backfill vocals and instruments on it.

Huddleston and Bare are still getting used to their newfound celebrity. Farmers from across the country call for advice on leading their own resistance. Bare is stopped for selfies.

“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,’” said Bare.

She knows the central irony of her situation: Just because she and her mother are refusing to sell their land doesn’t mean the data center won’t be built. It might even mean that they will soon be living near one but receive no compensation for the burden of doing so.

With the help of a walking stick, Bare visited her most beloved part of the farm on a recent morning. She may not be able to see, but she was still able to direct a driver over her land’s dips and turns simply by the map in her head and the feel of the ground, toward the spot by the creek where you can find the cows cooling on a hot day.

She’s had more on her mind lately than just getting them fed.

“On the Judgment Day, I’m only called to account for what I was supposed to be responsible for,” she said. “That’s the only way it can go on Judgment Day. What were you responsible for?”

Claude weighs in

There's no clear vote count or poll of the town, but the coverage paints a fairly consistent picture: the project has moved forward, and while a number of landowners have sold, the vocal public sentiment leans skeptical to opposed.

What's happened with landowners:

• The county approved zoning for the more than 2,000-acre data center, and the developer has been assembling roughly 2,000 acres from nearly 28 agricultural parcels. Local 12

• Some owners have sold, including the operator of the Meadowland Village mobile home park, whose owners have agreed to sell the land to the company. WVXU

• But several high-profile landowners have refused large offers: the Huddleston/Bare family turned down $60,000 an acre for a 71-acre property and a $48,000-an-acre offer for a 463-acre property, and Tim Grosser turned down an offer that escalated from twice market value to more than $8 million. LEX 18Local 12

• Because holdouts remain, the company revised its plans using land from owners who agreed to sell, meaning the data center could still be built nearby even without every parcel. Local 12

Public sentiment:

• A lawsuit has been filed challenging the zoning process, with one plaintiff arguing planning must supersede zoning, and that county officials are taking a "knee-jerk reaction" rather than following proper process. WVXU

• A resident quoted in coverage summed up a common view: she said she's not anti-technology, but is skeptical when something arrives with "more whispers, more legal muscle, than community support." yahoo

• Displaced trailer-park residents have expressed distress rather than support — one said she has no clear path forward and no homes to buy in the area. WCPO

• On the other side, county leadership has pushed forward on economic grounds: the county judge-executive says Mason County has to move quickly because it's competing with other regions for the project, and that the county can't stay dependent on agriculture, even while expressing sympathy for displaced residents. WVXU

No news source I found reports an actual survey or vote tally of "X% for, Y% against." The reporting suggests a county government and some landowners in favor (or willing to sell), a vocal and organized opposition (including a lawsuit), and a lot of residents caught in the middle — displaced or worried, but without a formal say in whether the project proceeds. If you want, I can dig further into the lawsuit or the most recent public meeting outcomes.