In a nutshell: An AI data center developer recently put $26 million on the table for roughly half of a 1,200-acre farm in Mason County, Kentucky – about ten times the local land value. The anonymous buyer, described as a major AI company, was looking for a large site for a new data center. The kind of project pitched in Mason County is built around high power density. AI servers draw a lot more electricity than standard data center hardware, and clusters can ramp usage up and down quickly. The data center boom they rejected is part of a much larger shift, as more facilities come online to handle AI workloads and push power demand higher.