When two men knocked on Ida Huddleston’s door last May, they carried a contract worth more than $33m in exchange for the Kentucky farm that had fed her family for centuries.

According to Huddleston, the men’s client, an unnamed “Fortune 100 company”, sought her 650 acres (260 hectares) in Mason county for an unspecified industrial development. Finding out any more would require signing a non-disclosure agreement.

More than a dozen of her neighbors received the same knock. Searching public records for answers, they discovered that a new customer had applied for a 2.2 gigawatt project from the local power plant, nearly double its annual generation capacity.

The unknown company was building a datacenter.

“You don’t have enough to buy me out. I’m not for sale. Leave me alone, I’m satisfied,” Huddleston, 82, later told the men.

As tech companies race to build the massive datacenters needed to power artificial intelligence across the US and the world, bids like the one for Huddleston’s land are appearing on rural doorsteps nationwide. Globally, 40,000 acres of powered land – real estate prepped for datacenter development – are projected to be needed for new projects over the next five years, double the amount currently in use.

Yet despite sums that often dwarf the land’s recent value, farmers are increasingly shutting the door. At least five of Huddleston’s neighbors gave similar categorical rejections, including one who was told he could name any price.

In Pennsylvania, a farmer rejected $15m in January for land he’d worked for 50 years. A Wisconsin farmer turned down $80m the same month. Other landowners have declined offers exceeding $120,000 per acre – prices unimaginable just a few years ago.

The rebuffs are a jarring reminder of AI’s physical bounds, and limits of the dollars behind the technology.

The new Gold Rush

Four generations of the Huddleston family have watched the world change from the same fields.

Ida’s grandfather was growing tobacco when the civil war erupted. Her father ploughed wheat through the first world war and the long attrition of the Great Depression. She and her five siblings grew up on beans, broccoli and potatoes pulled from soil once seared by dust bowl winds. No one in her family went to college – but by age 10, her children could already herd cattle across the same ground as their forebears.

“My whole entire life is nothing but the land. It’s provided me with anything and everything that I’ve needed for 82 years,” she says, speaking from the cabin her late husband built using local wood and rocks many decades ago.

Today, where residents see meandering creeks and open pastures, Silicon Valley executives see weak zoning protections, cheap power and abundant water.

Developers keep knocking because there are billions to be made. In northern Virginia last November, an investor paid $615m for less than 100 acres – property the seller had bought for just $57m four years prior. Days later, Amazon spent $700m on nearby farmland that had sold for a fraction of that price the year before. In Georgia, a local developer flipped land to Amazon for $270m after paying $4m for it 12 months earlier. For the middlemen scouting these deals, potential returns exceed 1,000%.

‘Name your price’

About 20 Mason county residents have reportedly been offered deals, with the datacenter project estimated to cover 2,000 acres.

After Dr Timothy Grosser, 75, rejected an $8m offer for his 250-acre farm – 3,500% more than he’d paid nearly four decades earlier – the developers came back with a new proposition: “Name your price.”

His answer: “There is none.”

Grosser lives, hunts and raises cattle on his land. Each Christmas, his family eats a turkey his grandson catches there. Alongside Huddleston and himself, Grosser estimates four landowners have refused to sell.

“All they’ve done all their life is farm grain, cattle, tobacco,” Grosser says. “To them, same as me, the money’s not worth giving up your lifestyle.”

For Huddleston’s daughter, Delsia Bare, 56, the connection runs deeper than skill sets. She remembers hoeing weeds from tobacco fields alongside her mother and grandmother, putting up hay through Kentucky summers. “There’s a bond with the land,” she says. “There’s no way to undo it. That’s family, that’s history.”

Beyond personal attachment, some farmers worry about broader consequences. The number of US farms has dropped more than 70% since 1935. Datacenters can strain power grids, drain local water supplies, contaminate soil and fragment wildlife habitat.

Bare puts it more bluntly: “You’re not going to grow a loaf of bread off of a datacenter.”

Not everyone is holding out; some Mason county farmers have agreed to sell if the project proceeds. “You can’t blame them,” Grosser acknowledges. “Giving them 10 million bucks for a farm?”

Those who refuse to sell say the utility company has warned it may invoke eminent domain – the government power to seize private property for public use. The threat isn’t empty: Dominion Energy used it against a Virginia farmer last April.

‘Sometimes-self-sacrificial stewardship’

The resistance reflects something economists struggle to quantify: the cultural weight of land stewardship. In his book Love for the Land, author Brooks Lamb describes how family farmers’ “sometimes-self-sacrificial stewardship” can lead to choices that defy financial logic, like refusing to consolidate into industrial operations.

“When told to ‘get big or get out’, these farmers choose neither,” he writes.

Maintaining the farm is viewed as a “birthright”, by many, says Mary Hendrickson, a professor of rural sociology at the University of Missouri. The responsibility to previous generations runs deep, sometimes dangerously so. During the 1980s’ farm crisis, when heavily indebted farmers faced bankruptcy and land loss, more than 900 male farmers in the midwest committed suicide.

“They’re somewhat irreversible,” Hendrickson says. “If you give the land over to them, it destroys what that land could be for agriculture.”

‘Keeping our people here’

Local officials in Mason county insist the datacenter would sustain future generations by bringing much-needed tax revenue and jobs, an argument being made in town halls across the country.

Mason’s population has shrunk by around 10% since 1980, largely due to the loss of manufacturing. Developers say the datacenter project would bring 1,000 construction jobs, although it may only create 50 full-time operational jobs.

In places like Loudoun county, Virginia – home to “Data Center Alley”, where about a fifth of the world’s internet traffic goes through – datacenter tax revenue nearly equals the county’s entire operating budget.

“We can continue to shrink – losing population, losing jobs and watching our young people leave for opportunities elsewhere – or we can chart a new course,” Tyler McHugh, Mason county’s industrial development director, said at a public hearing in December. “It’s about keeping our people here.”

What money can’t buy

As they offer multimillion-dollar deals, datacenter developers are not stealing Mason county land, yet some farmers feel a spiritual dispossession nonetheless.

A few months before the knock on her door last May, Delsia Bare lost most of her vision. Now she relies on sound to connect with the land: singing birds, the running creek. She fears a datacenter’s hum will drown out those connections, pushing the farm from physical reality into memory.

For now, she returns to what her family has relied on for generations. “The land, the land, the land,” as her mother puts it.

As AI promises to transcend corporeal fallibility, these standoffs reveal its very physical constraints – and Wall Street’s miscalculation of what some people value most. In the rolling hills of Mason county and farmland across America, that gap is measured not in dollars but in something harder to price: identity.