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."
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."
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.
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.