Data centers are West Virginia’s new strip mines

West Virginia is now on the frontline of a national shift that most people won’t notice until it shows up in their own bills, water tables or the substation down the road. This goes far beyond the typical Appalachian tragedies people are used to ignoring. Data centers and bitcoin mines are remaking rural America the same way coal once did. They move into weak regulatory terrain, rewrite the rules in their favor, drain the resources that communities rely on and send the value somewhere else. According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, 37 states have modified tax codes and regulatory structures specifically to attract data centers, with billions in exemptions granted annually. But the pattern is clearest in West Virginia, where the script is old and the state has lived through every version of it.

There’s a familiar smell to the data center boom in West Virginia. It’s the same old rot that came with coal, but now it’s wired up and rebranded so people can pretend it’s clean. Coal took the hills, the streams, the air and young men’s lungs. You could see the damage from the road. Strip mining leveled ridgelines so flat you could land a plane on them. Slurry ponds sat above towns like loaded guns. Everyone knew what was happening even if they pretended not to.

Data centers are the same kind of extraction, only this time the corporations are hiding them behind fences, nondisclosure agreements and a lot of glossy PR about “upcycling” coal mines and powering the future. Local reporting shows Blockchain Power Corp. bragging about being the first industrial data center in the state, dropping five bitcoin mines into abandoned coal sites at Hazelton, Ben’s Run, Tunnelton, Miracle Run and Blacksville. They pull 107 megawatts of power to keep their specialized computers humming so a global ledger can update itself every ten minutes for people who will never set foot in West Virginia. One hydrocooling site alone sits on 200,000 gallons of water to keep stacks of machines from overheating so someone else’s balance sheet can tick upward. For all that, they employ only 44 people.

Strip mining used to at least throw a few hundred jobs at a county while it hollowed everything else out. Now, West Virginia is trading away water, land, noise and grid capacity for a workforce small enough to fit inside a school bus. 

The sales pitch hasn’t changed since coal. But instead of coal barons in hardhats, there are executives in tech vests talking about “work ethic,” “perfect climate” and how there’s “an abundance of water in the Mon[ogahela River].” They say things like “we lighten the load on residential customers” while they pull megawatts off the same system everyone else is struggling to pay for. 

The new Power Generation and Consumption Act, which was signed into law by Republican Gov. Patrick Morrisey in April, is just strip mining written into energy policy. Morrisey and the West Virginia legislature built a special lane for these projects. Microgrids. Off-grid gas plants. Custom tax structures. Counties get 30% of the tax revenue while the state scoops the rest and the companies get their incentives. Local governments lost almost all power. There is no zoning, noise rules, light ordinances or land-use limits. If a data center wants to roar like a jet engine all night, that’s the deal. It’s the coal playbook, but this time the blast pattern is invisible. Instead of blowing the top off a mountain, you build a gas plant next to a town and run it 24/7 for server racks.

Tucker County is living this right now. A Virginia company wants to construct an off-grid gas plant between the towns of Thomas and Davis to power its own private data complex. People there are asking basic questions: Where is the water coming from? How much noise? What happens to the air? How many jobs, really? How long before they leave? They’re getting redacted permits and shrugs in return. 

Mingo County is considering two more off-grid plants branded as the “Adams Fork Data Center Energy Campus.” Jefferson and Berkeley counties have another complex in the works. Fidelis wants to build in Mason County. 

Data centers can use several million gallons of water a day, the same as a town of 10,000 to 50,000 people. In a lot of places around the country, residents already fight them over wells running low and rivers running hot. Harvard University’s electricity lawyers have already documented what common sense told everyone here a long time ago: When industrial customers demand more power, regular people end up footing the bill.

In coal country, we watched this cycle play out for a century. First came the promises of jobs, prosperity, schools and roads. Then came the exemptions. No local control; the state would handle it. The externalities that never made it into the press releases. Flooded hollers. Black water. Broken roads. Sick workers. 

When the coal gave out, the companies left and the bills stayed. Now data centers are pulling cheap power and water out of the ground and shipping the value out of state in the form of bitcoin, cloud storage, AI training runs and corporate “efficiency.” Instead of company towns, there are company microgrids. Rather than coal dust, you get a constant low-frequency hum and diesel backups.

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The state knows exactly what it’s doing. You don’t strip local governments of zoning, noise control, and land-use authority by accident. It’s a modernized method of extraction. The same agencies that refuse to release unredacted permits are the ones writing the compliance rules. They hold the hearings, take industry testimony and call it public input, even when no one from the public has enough information to challenge what is being approved. The regulatory framework is built around the assumption that these projects must happen and that whatever collateral damage emerges can be managed later or ignored entirely. West Virginians keep being told the state is “open for business,” but what it means is that communities have been positioned as collateral.

There is also a political calculation under all of this. Lawmakers know that most of these sites break ground long before the public even hears about them. By the time residents learn where the water is coming from or how loud the turbines will be, the permitting infrastructure is already locked into place and the tax structure has been negotiated behind closed doors. And that’s the point: The process moves faster than the opposition.If the public wants answers, they are told to wait until the next comment period, by which time the project is too entrenched to stop. 

West Virginians have been told their whole lives that they have to choose between being poor and in the dark, or selling themselves cheap to a jobs number that collapses under scrutiny. Data centers are being presented as permanent fixtures, but the industries they serve are some of the most volatile on earth. 

Bitcoin can collapse in a single bad cycle. Artificial intelligence workloads spike and fall depending on capital flows and investor appetite. Corporate cloud contracts shift between hyperscalers every quarter. When the economics turn, these companies will not hesitate to walk away. A data center stays only as long as it can pull cheap power. When they leave, the economic floor drops out from under the town with no warning. A data center that no longer fits a global balance sheet becomes nothing more than a warehouse full of dead machines and a power hookup the utility still has to maintain.

People in this state carry the outcomes of past booms in their daily lives. School closures came after projections that never held. Heavy industrial traffic tore up rural roads that were never built for that kind of weight, and the counties hit the hardest didn’t have the money or manpower to keep up with the damage. Streams turned chemical when operators left and the cleanup passed to taxpayers. 

None of this fades from memory, and it shapes how every new proposal is received. Any promise of economic renewal is measured against a long record of industries that took what they wanted — and left residents to manage the fallout.