Endangered American chestnut grove fights a 2,250-acre AI data center campus
404 Media · rss · 2026-10-21
A 404 Media investigation: a tiny American chestnut grove in Mason County, West Virginia sits in the path of UK startup Nscale's planned 2,250-acre Monarch Compute Campus, whose clients include Anthropic, Nvidia, and Microsoft. American chestnuts once spanned hundreds of millions of acres before a blight wiped out some four billion trees; conservationists have spent decades restoring them, and now data centers pose a new threat.
The project stems from a 2023 multibillion-dollar deal between Governor Jim Justice and Fidelis New Energy; Nscale acquired the campus entity in March. Construction has already caused harm: September storms sent runoff into neighboring properties when stormwater controls failed, prompting a DEP order to immediately repair erosion controls. Nscale promised to pay for damages and is trying to buy out homeowners, who are resisting.
The piece situates the fight in a national wave of backlash against hyperscale data centers, citing an Oklahoma farmer arrested for speaking against a 255-acre project and Elon Musk's xAI Colossus 2 running its own gas turbines off-grid, worsening pollution in nearby Black neighborhoods. A second data center, Project Tamarack, is also planned nearby.
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