Banish or build? Nobody wants to live beside the digital leviathan of a data center, but almost everyone wants an iPhone and an ever-growing buffet of digital goodies.
Forbid or foster? Welcome to agriculture’s Gordian knot, cinched by dollars and doom, where one farmer welcomes the money, and another answers the knock with a proverbial shotgun. Where one rural community votes welcome and rolls out a red carpet to attract Amazon or Facebook money, while another votes to shun and shutter.
With approximately 850 (and counting) grassroots opposition groups to data centers, the controversy is set to get exponentially hot, because the data gorilla is only just beginning to grow in farm country. How so? Roughly 87% of 4,000 existing data centers are in urban areas, but 67% of future data centers are set for rural locales. And like it or not, they will be built in a reshaping of the heartland. If not here, then there. Somewhere.
Opportunity ain’t necessarily pretty. Sometimes, it’s ugly as sin. However, one man’s opportunity can be another’s concrete curse. Welcome to a dog’s breakfast of data centers.
The Bleeding Ox
The facility’s scale is stunning. Mindboggling. On what was once partial row-crop ground in northeast Louisiana’s Richland Township, building after building is under construction, stretching 5 miles in length and 1 mile wide. Dubbed Hyperion, the 3,650-acre blanket of concrete and metal, over four times the size of NYC’s Central Park, is Meta’s latest data center addition.
This is no Walmart. Rather, it’s a $50 billion city. Don’t be awed by the size: Bigger will come. Always bigger.
Computer data centers trace back to the 1940s, but modern, energy-intensive AI versions, backed by trillions of dollars in investment, are an entirely different animal. Total numbers depend on who’s counting, but ballparked, roughly 4,000 data centers have been built nationwide in almost an overnight blitz from 2020 onward. Almost 1,500 are in the pipeline.
Packed with every component of the digital world, data centers fall into three types—enterprise, colocation, and hyperscale. Enterprise: one company uses the entire installation. Colocation: various companies use the same site. Hyperscale: massive complexes owned by the giants of industry.
Virginia is the data mecca, with over 600 data centers, followed by Texas with nearly 300, and California with 277. However, the next round of data centers is targeted at the Midwest and South. For most observers, the top concerns include (but are not limited to) land loss, water consumption, energy use, noise, eyesore, electric bill jumps, and lack of job growth once ensconced.
Are the concerns merited? Underestimated? Overblown? Maybe it depends on whose ox is gored.
Watts and Water Wars
Data centers need uninterrupted power. And then some. Therefore, a lone data center can drain as much power as 100,000 homes, but a titanic facility (such as Hyperion) can suck significantly more. Nearby homeowners then face potential blackouts or rate hikes.
Proponents contend data center efficiencies will increase over time, but massive power is, and will be, required. Considering all predictions point to skyrocketing demands for power in the future, when push comes to shove, nobody will flip the off-switch on a data center. The homes may go dark; the data centers stay bright.
According to MIT, data centers consumed over 4% of U.S. total electricity in 2023, with projections of 9% by 2030. Similarly, Goldman Sachs Commodities Research projects U.S. data center power demand to double in just two years, from 31 gigawatts in 2025 to 95 gigawatts (enough power to supply 71 million homes) in 2027.
Additionally, while data centers cannot technically use eminent domain to take property or farmland, they still do. How? By deploying utility companies to do the legwork via electric lines and power stations. Two state examples among many: In Union and Lycoming counties in Pennsylvania, and in Coweta, Fayette, Fulton, and Heard counties in Georgia, utility companies are in the process of taking homes and farmland for transmission corridors.
Water consumption, by the billions of gallons, is a steady concern of data center critics, but annual data center water use pales beside other industries. Agriculture, 40-plus trillion gallons; lawns, 3 trillion; golf courses, 500 billion; and data centers, 18 billion. However, in states and areas already parched, data centers drinking at the trough is a major concern.
Even in regions with ample water, farmland still falls in the crosshairs. Virginia producer Cory Garrett, 42, is battling a Caroline County attempt to seize his high-value and picturesque riverfront acres to build a water intake plant on the Rappahannock River. Notwithstanding the loss of 11 immediate acres, the seizure would impede crop management and pivot irrigation across the larger 143-acre field, which contains the highest yielding soils on his entire operation.
The plant would draw 14 million gallons per day—of which 4.63 million gallons would be used to cool a data center.
“Take into account data centers and commercial interests, and tell me, with a straight face, that big money interests are not involved,” Garrett says. “The county is tied into data, land values, and building projects—and everyone knows it.”
Disdain vs. Dollars
Not many farmers, landowners, or rural residents sing the visual praises of blue blankets of solar panels, wind tower giants, or data factories to the horizon. However, cash on the barrelhead doesn’t just talk; it sings.
In Luzerne County, northeast Pennsylvania, Marilee and David Kiliti accepted an offer for their small operation. The Kilitis were paid $22 million for their 89-acre hog farm in Salem Township. The couple was among 96 families who sold 1,700 acres to data center developers. Total tab? A whopping $586 million.
For withering rural counties hollowed out by job loss, the dollar potential of a data center is difficult to ignore, such as a proposed site in Coahoma County, Mississippi. Reports of $20 million to $150-plus million in annual tax windfalls are not unusual. (Permanent job creation is often minimal, with many state mandates requiring anywhere from none to 100 jobs for data center operation.)
Yet, disdain often overrides dollars, such as in Henderson County, Texas, where residents essentially rejected a data center, forcing the developer to withdraw. (Significantly, some reports note states losing major dollars to data center incentives.)
Mervin Raudabaugh, 85, a lifetime grower in Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, was offered $15 million for his ground (261 acres; $60,000 per acre) by data center developers. He turned it down in 2026, opting instead for $2 million by selling out to Lancaster Farmland Trust, ensuring the preservation of his farmland.
“Only the land that’s preserved here is going to be here,” he told Fox43. “The rest of it, every square inch is going to get built on. The American farm family is definitely in trouble.”
Echoing Raudabaugh, 82, a northern Kentucky mother and daughter, Ida Huddlestone and Delsia Bare, who raise cattle on 1,200 acres (some of the land held in the family since the Civil War) in Mason County, were offered $26 million for 600 acres. In 2026, they rejected the money.
Huddleston, told CBS: “I just said my land is not for sale. I never had a for sale sign on my land. I never wanted to sell my land. never even dreamed of thinking about selling my land. It’s priceless.
Bare, 54, echoed her mother: “It’s easy to say no to $26 million whenever it really doesn’t buy anything that you need. Once this land is gone, there wouldn’t be anything else I’d really want.”
NIMBY
Over the last handful of years, as data centers manifested in the overnight manner of Dollar Generals, the public reacted with knives out. The visceral response, particularly considering the infancy of AI, triggers hanging questions, yet to be answered: Is there an end? 10,000? Surely not? 20,000? More? Anyone? Anyone?
Railroads, highways, telephone poles, and electric lines had plentiful critics at their inception in history. Therefore, are data centers just one more change in the chain of technology? Or a bridge too far?
Americans, according to Gallup, would rather live beside a nuclear plant than a data center. Yet, the same not-in-my-backyard (NIMBY) advocates want an unending supply of digital data.
Are rural communities sacrificing the permanent on the altar of the temporary? The data center knot is yet to be cut.
For more from Chris Bennett (@ChrisBennettMS or cbennett@farmjournal.com or 662-592-1106), see:
Stealing the Farm: China Continues Raid of US Agriculture by Theft and Agroterror
Corn and Cocaine: Roger Reaves and the Most Incredible Farm Story Never Told
How the Deep State Tried, and Failed, to Crush an American Farmer
Game of Horns: Iowa Poacher’s Antler Addiction Leads to Historic Bust
Ghost Cattle: $650M Ponzi Rocks Livestock Industry, Money Still Missing
Georgia Watermelon Heist Explodes into Epic Night of Pandemonium
Sisters of Farm Fraud: How 4 Siblings Fleeced USDA for $10M
When Conservation Backfires: Landowner Defeats Feds in Mindboggling Private Property Case
Cold-Busted: Frozen Deer Decoy Nabs Poachers and Cocaine in Spectacular Sting
Sticky Fingers: USDA Fraudster Steals $200M in Stunning Scam
