Her skepticism is rooted in lived expertise: In October 2000, a large coal slurry spill from a mine web site upstream poisoned the Coldwater Fork stream, which runs behind her home. Individuals in Inez couldn’t drink water from the faucet for months.
“These of us residing 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 at the present time, 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 mentioned. “And I don’t care if it’s AI or crypto or no matter, we bow right down to them and allow them to inform us what they’re going to do to our neighborhood as a result of they’re job creators. They’re not job creators, they’re revenue makers.”
And the revenue leaves a footprint.
AI knowledge facilities demand staggering quantities of vitality—a ChatGPT search makes use of as much as 10 instances extra vitality than an everyday Google one—they usually run sizzling. To maintain them cool, these services eat 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, in order 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 the whole lot that we do,” mentioned Wes Hamilton, an area entrepreneur who did his fair proportion of crypto mining in Kentucky in its heyday. “Siri, ChatGPT, robotics—the whole lot you’ll be able to think about has to have AI,” he mentioned. “Bitcoin is a one-trick pony. You create it. The one person who will get paid is the proprietor of the machines.”
Hamilton claims there’s a path ahead the place knowledge facilities herald traders, engineers, possibly even firms prepared to remain. All of the AI folks on the earth could be steaming into Kentucky, Hamilton says. And whereas he admits to shedding 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 have 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 legislation.
The laws, solid as a protection of non-public monetary freedom, is designed to enshrine the appropriate 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 ultimately tempered, however the intent stays: to sign that, in Kentucky, digital extraction can hold buzzing.
Which is why we discovered ourselves outdoors this facility in Campton, gazing this semicircle of metallic buildings nestled within the timber. The mines run all night time and all day, even Sundays. And the query some are asking now, with bitcoin hovering round $100,000 and huge 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 mentioned 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 may have there. Let’s simply go forward and switch it on.’”
