Andy Masley: Data center land-use panic ignores decades of farmland sell-off

Andy Masley dismantles the ‘data centers are eating our farmland’ narrative with a scale comparison. Between 2000 and 2024, US farmers voluntarily sold off a Colorado-sized area of farmland — roughly 77 times the total footprint of all data center property projected for 2028 — while simultaneously growing more food than ever on the remaining acreage. Food access never suffered.

The rhetorical sleight of hand he flags: a single Loudoun County farmer selling a few acres of marginal hay field to a hyperscaler at 10x agricultural value triggers a moral panic about land scarcity, while the much larger ongoing sell-off to non-tech buyers gets no scrutiny. The hyperscaler premium is the story, not the acreage.

Simon Willison surfaces the quote as part of the broader pushback against environmental and land-use framings of AI infrastructure growth — arguments that often rely on absolute numbers stripped of comparative baselines.