I can’t help but notice that everyone is worried about the wrong AI apocalypse. Let me explain.
We’ve spent years bracing for sentient machines, mass unemployment, and deepfakes that fool our own mothers. Meanwhile, a quieter, more concrete danger has been unfolding in plain sight: corporate greed, dressed up as innovation, with an appetite that keeps growing and a habit of never sharing what it takes. The disappearance of farmland is driven by the appetite for AI data centers.
Who is the ogre that needs constant feeding? Artists, mathematicians, scientists, writers, and ordinary people whose words, images, and ideas trained the models that now generate billions in revenue for a few companies and their shareholders, all without consent, credit, or a cent of profit-sharing. That extraction was never going to stay confined to data. It was always going to come for something physical, something finite. The ogre came for the land.
Specifically, it came for farmland. And what happens to farmland determines what ends up on dinner tables, yours, mine, and everyone’s.
AI doesn’t rely on cleverness alone. It runs on enormous physical infrastructure: server farms that consume staggering amounts of electricity, water for cooling, and, critically, space. Rural farmland offers exactly what data center developers are looking for: large contiguous parcels, robust water systems originally built for irrigation, flat terrain, and a conspicuous absence of the zoning restrictions that slow things down in cities. Agricultural publication AgroLatam recently warned that the AI data center boom is placing farmers in direct competition with Big Tech for two of agriculture’s most essential inputs—electricity and water. The publication notes that growers, unlike many industrial users, can’t simply shift irrigation or harvest schedules to avoid peak demand, making them especially vulnerable to rising utility costs and strained infrastructure.
So the offers to purchase, some may say displace, have come in, and they have come in big. Developers have dangled payouts running five to ten times a property’s traditional agricultural value, $26 million for a parcel in Kentucky and $80 million in Wisconsin. For a retiring farmer, that kind of money is generational wealth. For the food system as a whole, this is a one-way door. Once an acre is turned into a server campus, it can never again be a peach orchard or grow produce.
That’s the trade nobody is naming out loud: every acre converted to a data center is an acre that no longer grows food.
I don’t need a hypothetical to see where this scenario leads. California’s Central Valley is already living it. And that’s where I became alarmed.
Earlier this year, growers began destroying an estimated 420,000 peach trees after Del Monte Foods shuttered its canneries in Modesto and Hughson, leaving farmers across the region without a buyer for tens of thousands of tons of fruit. Many of these farmers were multi-generational operations that had relied on twenty-year contracts with the company. The estimated hit to regional revenue: $550 million.
A hundred miles north, in Watsonville, the apple growers of the Pajaro Valley are watching their orchards come down too. S. Martinelli & Co., which historically purchased roughly 95 percent of the valley’s apple crop, has shifted to cheaper out-of-state fruit, paying around $135 a ton for discarded apples from Washington State instead of roughly $400 a ton for the local harvest. Longtime orchards, including the 100-acre Five Mile Orchards, are being bulldozed. Heirloom varieties like the Newtown Pippin are giving way to berries, which still have a buyer. Local cideries don’t have the capacity to absorb what Martinelli’s left behind. You watch. I predict a data center has already made an offer.
Neither of these stories is directly about AI. They’re about something just as relevant to the argument: food-growing land and the farmers who work it are already disposable to corporate bottom lines. AI’s land grab doesn’t introduce that logic; it accelerates a machine that was already running.
And sometimes the conversion is even more direct. A New York Times investigation traced more than ninety Texas-registered companies back to Elon Musk and his inner circle, at least a dozen of which were used to quietly assemble over a thousand acres of former agricultural and pasture land in Bastrop and Travis counties. Musk’s total footprint in the area is now widely reported at roughly 3,500 acres, land that once supported grazing and crops now home to SpaceX and Tesla facilities, a private school, and Snailbrook, his planned company town. This isn’t a story about stockpiling land for food security. It’s the same conversion happening to data center land: agricultural ground, permanently repurposed for industrial use, never to grow food again.
A Fight That’s Tilted From the Start
This conversion isn’t happening without resistance. In Montour County, Pennsylvania, residents fought back when Talen Energy sought to rezone 800 acres of farmland for a data center built with Amazon Web Services, though the farmers actually displaced were leaseholders, not owners, dependent on the broader community to fight on their behalf. In Coweta County, Georgia, seventeen residents and landowners sued after officials rezoned nearly 830 acres of protected rural land for a hyperscale data center campus, alleging the county bypassed its own environmental review. In Jackson, Mississippi, a two-acre family farm sits in the middle of a proposed data center site, and the city council is weighing a six-month moratorium amid resident anger over how little notice anyone received. Moratoriums have piled up in New Orleans, in Denver, and across the state of Maine, local governments buying time to figure out rules for an industry moving faster than they can regulate it.
Not every fight ends the same way. In Prince William County, Virginia, nearly 2,000 acres of agricultural and residential land were rezoned to make way for a 37-data-center complex near Manassas National Battlefield, and the lawsuits only arrived after the rezoning had already been approved. Visibility and standing don’t guarantee a win; they’re simply the minimum requirement to be in the fight at all.
Environmental activist Erin Brockovich, whose name became synonymous with exposing hidden environmental harms, says the AI infrastructure boom feels like “Hinkley on fricking steroids,” referring to the California groundwater contamination case that launched her career. She’s since created a nationwide map tracking proposed and existing data centers after hearing from communities that often didn’t know projects had been approved until construction was already underway. Her warning isn’t really about artificial intelligence itself. It’s about what happens when enormous industrial projects consuming vast amounts of land, water, and electricity arrive with little public notice—and even less public consent.
I contacted Brockovich for comment on this story but had not received a response by the time of publication.
But look closely at where these fights succeed, and a pattern emerges: pushback works only where someone still has legal standing to fight. Landowners can sue. Residents can show up to a zoning hearing. Farmers leasing their land, like the ones displaced in Montour County, have no such standing; they depend on others to fight on their behalf. And growers like the ones in Modesto or Watsonville have no standing at all. There’s no hearing when a company simply declines to renew a contract. No vote. No appeal. Just silence and an empty buyer’s seat.
Zoning fights are visible because they require government approval. Contract terminations are invisible because they require none. Both the AI land grab and the slow-motion collapse of family farming are, in their own way, engineered to bypass the one form of leverage ordinary people have.
Here’s where it gets damning.
Bill Gates is the largest private farmland owner in the United States, with more than 275,000 acres across nineteen states, accumulated mainly through his investment firm, Cascade Investment, starting around 2013. That predates the AI boom by a decade; this isn’t an AI story, and Gates himself has said there’s no grand scheme behind it. Jeff Bezos and Ted Turner hold vast tracts of their own, tied to conservation and “Earth Fund” initiatives. Whatever their individual motives, the throughline is structural, not conspiratorial: a small number of extraordinarily wealthy individuals now hold an outsized and growing share of the land that determines how, or whether, the rest of us eat.
Two separate channels of concentrated wealth, AI infrastructure money on one side and asset-class investment by individual billionaires on the other, are converging on the same finite resource at a pace and price that small farmers and ordinary families cannot compete with.
I have this fear.
Here is the future closing in, and it deserves to be said plainly: rising food insecurity and scarcity for most of us, with fresh produce turning into a luxury commodity most families can no longer reliably afford, while land ownership concentrates into fewer and fewer hands. It’s the slow substitution of an orchard for a server rack, a peach grower for a quarterly earnings call, and a family farm for a hedge against inflation.
Picture the two ends of that substitution side by side. On one end: a small class of landowners, such as the Gates, the Bezos, and Musk, men who can buy 3,500 acres through a dozen shell companies without anyone noticing for years, drawing produce from their own private holdings, insulated from contract collapses, water shortages, and grocery store price swings because they own the supply chain outright. On the other end: everyone whose access to food runs through a market that has been quietly hollowed out, fewer working orchards, fewer canneries willing to sign a contract, and fewer farms left standing between a family and a corporate supplier with no obligation to show up next season. When the fresh stuff gets too scarce or too expensive, what’s left is what doesn’t spoil and doesn’t require a farmer down the road: the shelf-stable aisle, the instant ramen, the cup of noodles that asks nothing of a supply chain except hot water.
That’s not a fringe scenario invented for effect. As I see it, it’s the logical endpoint of every trend. Run forward a little further: land leaving food production, contracts disappearing with no recourse, and ownership concentrating in fewer hands. Nobody has to plan a two-tier food system for one to arrive. It just requires everyone currently winning to keep doing exactly what they’re already doing.
The people who will feel that substitution first are the same people who built the wealth behind it: the artists, the writers, the journalists, the researchers, and the ordinary contributors whose work trained the systems now eating the ground beneath their feet, without ever sharing the profits. Visions of meals consisting of noodles in a cup for the masses.
Is There a Way Out?
As I reported previously in the article The Monster Under the Floorboards: Why California’s Grid Can’t Feed the AI Gold Rush, there is at least one serious idea on the table by Senator Bernie Sanders. On June 18, Sanders introduced the American AI Sovereign Wealth Fund Act, legislation that would impose a one-time 50 percent tax, paid in company stock, not cash, on AI firms with more than $200 million in annual sales. The resulting shares would fund a federally managed sovereign wealth fund that Sanders estimates could reach $7 trillion at current valuations, paying out roughly $1,000 a year to every American through a 5 percent annual dividend. A seven-member, Senate-confirmed Independent Commission for Democratic AI would hold voting shares and board seats with the power to block decisions deemed harmful to the public.
Sanders told NPR that more importantly than the money, Americans would get a say: “Well, the more important point is that the public would have 50% representation on every major AI company. That’s the more important point, actually. And that means that when Mr. Musk and Mr. Bezos and these billionaires who now control the industry want to do something that will be harmful to the American people, 50% of the people representing the public will say, sorry, you can’t do that. And we have got to work to make sure that AI and robotics work for all of us, not just to enrich people who are already incredibly wealthy and powerful.”
The bill has little chance of passing the current Congress. But its existence matters anyway, because Sanders’ own justification echoes the very point I brought in the opening paragraph: AI was not built from the singular genius of any one executive. It was built on the collective knowledge and creative labor of millions of people who were never asked and never paid, and it needs to be discussed and remedied.
That’s the question worth sitting with. If the people who run these companies won’t share the wealth they built on our collective work, our art, our research, and our ideas, why should we expect them to care, even a little, about how the rest of us are going to eat while they concert farmland into data center?
Credit Brockovich AI Data Center Reporting: Community Photos Images from residents across the country documenting the real-world footprint of AI data centers—from construction sites to protest signs to cooling towers.
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