TAHLEQUAH, Aug. 18 -- When Ida Huddleston, 82, was offered roughly $26 million for portions of her 1,200-acre family farm near Maysville, Kentucky, she gave the unnamed tech company a verdict in seven words. "You can't get food out of a data center," she said and turned down an offer that valued her soil at nearly ten times its market rate.

On Sunday, the Cherokee Nation offered a more formal version of the same answer. Principal Chief Chuck Hoskin Jr. announced a ban on hyperscale data center projects on all land owned by or held in trust for the Cherokee Nation, citing a task force survey in which approximately 64 percent of 1,593 respondents opposed such facilities on the reservation. The decision makes the Cherokee Nation the largest...