Her skepticism is rooted in lived expertise: In October 2000, an enormous coal slurry spill from a mine website upstream poisoned the Coldwater Fork stream, which runs behind her home. Folks in Inez couldn’t drink water from the faucet for months.
“These of us dwelling downstream did not hear about it for some time, however the faculty system needed to shut down for a few week till they acquired an alternate water supply,” she says.
To this present day, many in Inez nonetheless don’t belief the faucet water.
So when McCoy hears the hype about AI, she hears one thing else: one other promise that comes with a price. “We’ve allowed these folks to be known as job creators,” she stated. “And I don’t care if it’s AI or crypto or no matter, we bow all the way down to them and allow them to inform us what they will do to our group as a result of they’re job creators. They’re not job creators, they’re revenue makers.”
And the revenue leaves a footprint.
AI information facilities demand staggering quantities of vitality—a ChatGPT search makes use of as much as 10 occasions extra vitality than an everyday Google one—they usually run sizzling. To maintain them cool, these services devour billions of gallons of water yearly. Most of that evaporates, however residents are cautious as a result of they’ve had issues with services and their runoff up to now, so that they fear these new services may have an effect on fish and disrupt the land. The very issues the residents of Kentucky hope to protect.
Nonetheless, some locals see potential, even progress.
“AI is in every thing that we do,” stated Wes Hamilton, an area entrepreneur who did his fair proportion of crypto mining in Kentucky in its heyday. “Siri, ChatGPT, robotics—every thing you possibly can think about has to have AI,” he stated. “Bitcoin is a one-trick pony. You create it. The one individual that will get paid is the proprietor of the machines.”
Hamilton claims there’s a path ahead the place information facilities herald traders, engineers, possibly even corporations prepared to remain. All of the AI folks on this planet could be steaming into Kentucky, Hamilton says. And whereas he admits to dropping a fortune in crypto ventures up to now, he claims that is completely different.
When Bitcoin first arrived, lawmakers supplied beneficiant tax breaks to lure miners. Firms investing greater than $1 million had been exempted from paying gross sales taxes on {hardware} and electrical energy. After which, in March 2025, Kentucky governor Andy Beshear took all that and went a step additional by signing a “Bitcoin Rights” invoice into regulation.
The laws, forged as a protection of private monetary freedom, is designed to enshrine the fitting to make use of digital property in Kentucky. An earlier draft went additional, aiming to bar native governments from utilizing zoning legal guidelines to limit crypto mining operations—a provision that drew resistance from environmental teams. That language was finally tempered, however the intent stays: to sign that, in Kentucky, digital extraction can maintain buzzing.
Which is why we discovered ourselves outdoors this facility in Campton, watching this semicircle of metallic buildings nestled within the timber. The mines run all evening and all day, even Sundays. And the query some are asking now, with bitcoin hovering round $100,000 and massive miners speaking about pivoting to AI, is whether or not bitcoin mining will get a second wind in Kentucky.
Mohawk’s bitcoin mining might even make a comeback. Anna Whites stated the events are supposed to enter arbitration Might twelfth. “I’m hopeful,” she instructed us. “I’m very hopeful that they sit down and say, ‘Mighty good plant you’ve got there. Let’s simply go forward and switch it on.’”
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