A Rare Chestnut Grove Could Be Bulldozed for an AI Data Center

The American chestnut was once one of the most dominant trees in the eastern United States — an estimated 4 billion trees stretching from Maine to Georgia, providing food and timber for generations of people and wildlife. Then a blight arrived from Asia in the early 1900s and killed nearly all of them within decades. The American chestnut went from ubiquitous to functionally extinct in the wild within a single human lifetime.

Which is why what’s happening in Mason County, West Virginia right now matters well beyond a dispute over a patch of trees.

What’s There and Why It’s Irreplaceable

At the former Clements State Tree Nursery in West Columbia, there is a grove of approximately 200 American chestnut trees — reportedly planted in the 1970s from wild survivors of the blight, trees that managed to carry some resistance to it. Over the past 50 years, those trees have grown into what conservationists describe as critical restoration infrastructure. The American Chestnut Foundation’s West Virginia chapter has identified the grove as a primary source of nuts used to grow seedlings for state and local restoration programs. Losing the trees wouldn’t just mean losing 200 specimens. It would mean losing the genetic source material that much of the region’s chestnut restoration work depends on.

Environmental advocacy group Global Justice Ecology Project issued an urgent action alert warning that the grove could be cleared as early as November 1, 2026.

What’s Being Built There

The project is called the Monarch Compute Campus, developed by a company called Nscale in collaboration with Nvidia and Caterpillar. Nscale has described it as “one of the largest single AI infrastructure investments in US history,” covering more than 2,250 acres and representing over $20 billion in capital. The campus is intended to support computing needs for AI companies — with Anthropic reportedly committed to spending approximately $45 billion over six years for computing capacity at the West Virginia site.

At that scale, stopping the project is essentially not on the table. The question is whether the grove has to be part of what gets cleared.

A Disputed Footprint

That’s where the story gets complicated. Nscale’s official website has stated that the former Clements State Tree Nursery is not part of its site — meaning, according to the developer, the grove isn’t in the construction footprint at all. But advocates say the development around the nursery site is close enough to put the grove at risk, and the American Chestnut Foundation’s West Virginia chapter has publicly warned about the potential impact.

West Virginia Governor Patrick Morrisey has since weighed in, saying the trees will be relocated on the property under professional supervision in late 2027 — not bulldozed. Environmental groups are watching to see whether that commitment holds and what relocation would actually mean for trees that have been growing in place for half a century.

Why This Lands Differently

Data center development has been pushing into rural land across the country at a pace that communities are struggling to process — water use, power demand, tax base questions, traffic, visual impact. This particular story has caught attention because the American chestnut is so culturally freighted. It’s not an abstract endangered species most people have never heard of. It’s a tree that older Americans remember, that shaped Eastern forests, that shows up in Christmas songs, and that restoration ecologists have spent decades trying to bring back.

Fifty years of blight-resistant trees, potentially cleared in a few weeks, to support computing infrastructure for AI companies whose energy and land demands are unlike anything the tech industry has generated before.

Whether the grove survives — and whether relocation preserves anything that matters botanically — is still unresolved. But the argument over it has become a sharp symbol of a broader collision between the physical scale of AI infrastructure buildout and the landscapes it’s landing on.

Weather changes fast, so help your community stay prepared. Share this story with friends, family, or your group chat, and keep your forecast in the now with Weather Forecast Now.