NDAs and Hidden Deals: The AI Land Grab’s Growing Backlash – Miner Weekly

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Across rural America, the AI infrastructure boom is increasingly taking shape behind closed doors.

For much of the past year, some of the biggest names in AI infrastructure have been hunting for land in rural America the same way they hunt for power: quietly, quickly and often before the public knows what is happening.

The playbook has become increasingly familiar. Developers approach local officials under nondisclosure agreements (NDAs), use intermediaries or shell entities to mask the ultimate buyer, and begin assembling hundreds of acres before residents can organize around what a project might mean for farmland, water use, noise and electricity demand. That secrecy may help companies lock up strategic sites in a fiercely competitive market for AI infrastructure, but it is also becoming a political liability.

Now the backlash is getting harder to ignore.

In Wisconsin, at least five communities have now been linked to NDAs tied to proposed data center developments, according to Wisconsin Watch, which found secrecy arrangements in Beaver Dam, Kenosha, Janesville, Menomonie and most recently Beloit. In Beaver Dam, Meta used shell companies in the early stages of a 520-acre, roughly $1 billion campus. Across the state, seven major data center projects are pending with a combined value of more than $57 billion, making Wisconsin one of the clearest examples of how the AI buildout is colliding with demands for public disclosure.

The pushback has become forceful enough that Microsoft — one of the most aggressive builders of AI data center capacity globally — said this month it would stop using NDAs with local governments for data center development. The company said the old practice had been meant to protect commercially sensitive information, but that transparency with communities had become “paramount.” Microsoft added that it is working to identify and terminate active NDAs with local governments, even as it reserved the right to keep using confidentiality protections for certain trade secrets and land acquisitions.

That policy shift says as much about politics as it does about process. Microsoft President Brad Smith said this week that winning over local communities has become essential as towns across the U.S. increasingly protest data center projects. Reuters reported that opposition in parts of the Midwest and Northeast has already contributed to canceled developments over concerns ranging from power prices and water usage to pollution from related energy infrastructure.

What is changing is not just the scale of the projects, but the scale of what communities feel they are being asked to absorb before anyone has had an honest public debate.

In Mason County, Kentucky, for instance, officials have backed a proposed hyperscale campus that would span about 2,080 acres of agricultural land outside Maysville. The plan envisions six data center buildings, multiple substations, stormwater ponds and phased construction beginning in summer 2027 if approvals move forward. County officials have pitched the project as an economic engine that could bring 400 full-time jobs and thousands of construction jobs, while also keeping the identity of the company behind it undisclosed unless the development is ultimately approved.

That secrecy has helped turn the project into a local flashpoint. Realtor.com and local broadcaster WKRC reported that several farming families have rejected lucrative offers to sell. One mother and daughter turned down more than $26 million for part of their land, while another family previously refused nearly $8 million. Officials say at least 20 residents were approached and 18 signed conditional sale agreements, but the holdouts have become symbols of a broader resistance: not necessarily to data centers as such, but to the idea that farmland can be quietly assembled for an unnamed AI customer and only debated in earnest after the map is largely drawn.

A similar drama is playing out in Pennsylvania, where 86-year-old farmer Mervin Raudabaugh rejected more than $15 million from a data center developer for his 261 acres in Cumberland County. Instead, he sold the development rights for about $2 million to preserve the land for agriculture. Realtor.com reported that the developer’s outreach had been persistent, while local preservation advocates said deep-pocketed data center buyers are increasingly targeting large tracts of open farmland that conservation groups cannot match on price.

Taken together, the cases point to a deeper tension in the AI infrastructure boom. For hyperscalers and their development partners, secrecy is often treated as a practical necessity. Land is scarce, power is scarcer, and once word gets out, prices can jump, competitors can swoop in and local opposition can organize before a project is mature enough to present in full. Microsoft said as much in explaining why NDAs became common in the first place.

But the communities being targeted are increasingly viewing that same secrecy as a warning sign.

In Wisconsin, backlash over confidential negotiations has fueled legislative efforts to restrict local governments from signing NDAs with data center developers. Critics say the issue is bigger than whether companies are entitled to protect trade secrets. It is about whether elected officials should be negotiating projects that can reshape land use, tax policy, infrastructure planning and local utility systems without telling the people who will live next to them.

That tension is likely to intensify as the AI buildout moves beyond established data center corridors into rural counties with abundant acreage and relatively easier paths to large-scale development. The industry still has money, urgency and political support on its side. But the farmers turning down eight-figure offers in Kentucky and Pennsylvania are a reminder that not every acre is just another site-control exercise.

In the AI race, land is becoming as strategic as chips and megawatts. The more quietly developers try to secure it, the more likely rural communities are to ask what else they are not being told.

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