Over a century ago, in 1904, a necrotrophic fungus known as chestnut blight swept across North America, brought across the Pacific on the back of chestnut trees from Japan and China.
With no natural resistance to the fungal scourge, the once-plentiful chestnut trees of North America were ravaged, killing an estimated 4 billion across the United States alone. Today, all that remains of naturally occurring American chestnut trees are stumps, whose sproutlings never reach maturity.
While horticulturists have developed some blight-resistant hybrids to keep the species technically alive, fully mature groves remain incredibly rare — with fewer than 4,300 acres of fruit-producing chestnut trees across the continental US as of 2023.
Yet there could soon be one fewer chestnut grove if one data center developer gets its way. As explained by a blistering call to action in From the Front Lines: Struggles for Justice, a publication of the New York-based Global Justice Ecology Project, a grove of 200 blight-resistant chestnut trees are at risk of being bulldozed to make way for a hyperscale data center in West Virginia.
Called the “Monarch Compute Campus,” the data center constellation is being developed by the company Nscale, “in collaboration with Nvidia and Caterpillar,” per a company blog post. Based on its current development plans, the fully constructed Monarch facility will span over 2,250 acres, supplying 8 gigawatts worth of computing capacity to AI companies like Anthropic.
Given the sheer volume of capital being thrown at the project — over $20 billion all-told — stopping the data center may be easier said than done. As Nscale’s website proudly declares, the Monarch facility is “one of the largest single AI infrastructure investments in US history, anchoring America’s compute foundation.”
Yet as Front Lines notes, chestnut trees of this kind are “irreplaceable,” serving as a crucial lifeline for future generations of new chestnut growth.
“Planted in the 1970s from wild surviving American chestnuts, this orchard is a vital ‘genetics library,’” Front Lines explains, representing “the primary seed source to restore the species across West Virginia.”
More on data centers: Finland Orders Google to Suspend New Data Centers After Contractors Pave Over Protected Forests
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