Meet the 82-year-old Kentucky grandma who turned down $26 million to turn her farm into a data center: ‘I don’t need your money’

Ida Huddleston has lived on the same stretch of farmland outside Maysville, Ky., since she was 16. She and her late husband built a log home there, raised children, and worked the soil through six decades of marriage. Today, the family owns roughly 1,200 acres, and multiple generations still live on it.

Last spring, an unnamed company described only as a major artificial intelligence firm came looking for a piece of it, according to WKRC Local 12. The company approached dozens of landowners in Mason County about buying roughly half of the Huddleston family’s property for a proposed data center campus.

Huddleston, 82, was offered about $60,000 an acre for her 71 acres, over $4 million. Her daughter, Delsia Bare, 54, was offered $48,000 an acre for her 463 acres, putting her potential payout above $22 million. Combined, the family’s offer topped $26 million, well above the roughly $6,000-an-acre going rate........

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