US farmers are rejecting multimillion-dollar datacenter bids for their land

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/feb/21/us-farmers-datacenters

by carabiner • 5 months ago

50 11 5 months ago

If only they knew they could make billions…

ggm• 5 months ago

Farming is odd, because there's a huge inter-generational phobia about selling the heritage, but there's also a degree of pragmatism (bad year? shoot the cows) going on. And, there's also often a massive debt overhang, tolerated by the system as a whole, because of the boom-and-bust nature of the business. It wouldn't surprise me if a lot of land owners told "$14m for your paddocks" would only see a low value in that, because of the debt overhang.

It also would not surprise me if a lot of these prices are tail payment, and predicated on the plan getting up, and involve middlemen who are brokering the land up to bigger players in the hyperscaler space. Lots of NDA, not much money up front.

I would think that there are brownfield ex-factory sites which make more sense.

Farming is agribusiness is big business. People who are in farming for the long haul. But, if its not a family enterprise (and a lot isn't any more) and if there's a board, and shareholders, then the temptation to cash out and move money to another place is there. So I expect despite all these refusals from one cohort of the farm sector, there's another one which is looking at the merits of this and for the right package, will jump. But they will want a lot more than ag. value per hectare/acre on this, they won't settle for the value as soybeans, they want the value as a multi-billion dollar enterprise outcome.

I sure hope some of them really are the green heart, who value nature. But I think the story is going to be a lot more multi dimensional than that.

alphawhisky2• 5 months ago

I would think that there are brownfield ex-factory sites which make more sense.

This exactly. Why are these companies not forced to develop in bigger cities that have the existing infrastructure to support them. Detroit could use all the property tax it can collect and those companies do the public little good being out in the middle of nowhere dodging taxes and regulations. Seems like an opportune chance to force them to be urban and a little more beneficial to society.

stonogo• 5 months ago

Why are these companies not forced

By whom? The elected officials whose campaigns they underwrote?

givemeethekeys• 5 months ago

People think of American farmers like they are some poor innocent country bumpkins, instead of what they really are - multi-generational business owners.

If there is a real deal to be had, they'll be first in line to accept it, regardless of what the spin doctors in the news want you to believe.

bigstrat2003• 5 months ago

Farmers, like anyone else, are a diverse group of people you can't easily generalize. They are all business owners, sure, but only some are in it primarily for the money. Others feel that it's their responsibility to hang on to the farm passed down through the generations. Still others aren't on an ancestral farm, but love the job for its own sake and wouldn't give it up to build a datacenter no matter how much money they were offered. It just depends.

dmonitor• 5 months ago

Somewhat concerning that AI is now competing for resources with our food production.

ahaferburg• 5 months ago

It's not AI, it's AI companies, at the behest of their stewards and owners.

People with money have been competing with you for your assets for a long time. And they will keep outcompeting you.

marcuskane2• 5 months ago

This is much ado about nothing.

The US has so much excess capacity in farmland that we do absurd things with our excess corn and soybeans. We refine soybeans into ethanol to put into our gasoline. We feed corn to cows which kills them in fairly short order, but we just slaughter them before they die from the diet. We put high fructose corn syrup into everything. We use corn and soy derivatives for random industrial and chemical feedstock.

Data centers won't take up even .0001% of farm land, and "food production" wouldn't be meaningfully impacted unless we lost many, many orders of magnitude more land than that. This is panic about a rain drop in the ocean.

gus_massa• 5 months ago

I agree.

We refine soybeans into ethanol [...]. We feed corn to cows [...]

Did you mix them? Soybeans have a lot of protein that is good to grow muscle in cows. Corn is mostly starch that is cheaper than protein and starch is made of sugar that is easy to split in ethanol.

Also, there are more productive and less productive farms. Here in Argentina some of them operate only when the price of soybean or corn is high.

US farmers are rejecting multimillion-dollar datacenter bids for their land

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