Kentucky’s Bitcoin Boom Has Gone Bust

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 couple of week till they bought an alternate water supply,” she says.

To this present day, 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 value. “We’ve allowed these folks to be referred to as job creators,” she stated. “And I don’t care if it’s AI or crypto or no matter, we bow all the way down to them and allow them to inform us what they’ll do to our group as a result of they’re job creators. They’re not job creators, they’re revenue makers.”

And the revenue leaves a footprint.

AI data centers demand staggering amounts of energy—a ChatGPT search makes use of as much as 10 occasions extra power than an everyday Google one—and so they 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 previously, so that they fear these new services might 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 all the pieces that we do,” stated Wes Hamilton, a neighborhood entrepreneur who did his fair proportion of crypto mining in Kentucky in its heyday. “Siri, ChatGPT, robotics—all the pieces you may think about has to have AI,” he stated. “Bitcoin is a one-trick pony. You create it. The one individual that will get paid is the proprietor of the machines.”

Hamilton claims there’s a path ahead the place information facilities herald buyers, engineers, perhaps even corporations prepared to remain. All of the AI folks on the earth can be steaming into Kentucky, Hamilton says. And whereas he admits to shedding a fortune in crypto ventures previously, he claims that is completely different.

When Bitcoin first arrived, lawmakers supplied beneficiant tax breaks to lure miners. Firms investing greater than $1 million had 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, forged as a protection of private monetary freedom, is designed to enshrine the best to make use of digital belongings 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 finally tempered, however the intent stays: to sign that, in Kentucky, digital extraction can hold buzzing.

Which is why we discovered ourselves exterior this facility in Campton, watching this semicircle of steel buildings nestled within the bushes. The mines run all evening and all day, even Sundays. And the query some are asking now, with bitcoin hovering round $100,000 and big miners talking about pivoting to AI, is whether or not bitcoin mining will get a second wind in Kentucky.

Mohawk’s bitcoin mining could even make a comeback. Anna Whites stated 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 could have there. Let’s simply go forward and switch it on.’”