Zeros

When the Grid Becomes a Target: Appalachia Rewind When communities feel steamrolled by industrial buildouts they never asked for, what happens next? And could infrastructure incidents near contested development zones be more than coincidence? West Virginia is ground zero for that tension right now. Gov. Patrick Morrisey and the West Virginia DEP have been pushing hard toward a data center buildout, backed by House Bill 2014, passed in April 2025, which prohibits counties and municipalities from enforcing or adopting regulations that limit high-impact data center projects . [ West Virginia Gazette Mail ]  In Tucker County, a Virginia company called Fundamental Data applied for an air quality permit for what it's calling the Ridgeline Facility — a natural gas power plant and data center complex proposed to be built between the tourist towns of Thomas and Davis, covering potentially 10,000 acres . [ West Virginia Watch ]  Residents there created a grassroots coal...

When the Data Center Moves In and the Water Follows Residents along University Lane in Mason County, West Virginia didn't sign up to be a cautionary tale. But that's where they landed on the weekend of May 23rd , when a construction site for the Monarch Compute Campus — a data center initiative between AI company Nscale and energy infrastructure firm Fidelis New Energy [ MSN ] — contributed to severe flooding that damaged their homes. Site manager Jason Bechtle acknowledged that the storm dropped roughly a month's worth of rain in two days, and that while the site's stormwater measures had passed inspection the prior week , a stretch of silt fence gave way under the volume of water. [ The Cool Down ] The company said it would cover cleanup and repair costs. That's something, at least . But one resident noted the damage started earlier than the flood — during tree clearing, he says workers took down 12 to 15 trees on his property . [ WCHS ]  The floo...

AI Infrastructure &  The Next Bet: AI Data Centers on Tribal Land Washington is pitching AI infrastructure as an economic lifesaver for Native American Tribes . The digital currency community has seen this movie before — and it didn't always end happily ever after. For Digital Currency Hobbyists The U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Indian Energy  has recently published a four-color brochure aimed at Native American Tribal governments. The pitch : partner with hyperscale data center developers, lease your land, sell your power, and collect a stake in the infrastructure boom fueling artificial intelligence . The document is enthusiastic, professionally illustrated , and conspicuously light on the kinds of warnings that might slow down a deal. If that sounds familiar, it should . A generation ago, the same optimistic framing surrounded Tribal gaming — casinos as a form of economic sovereignty. And for a while, it worked. Then came the buyouts, the manageme...