That's what makes this such a boneheaded move.
Developer Nscale is building a massive 2,250-acre AI data center campus in West Virginia, with Anthropic as a customer and Nvidia as a partner. The site includes a nursery with two dozen mature American chestnut trees.
A blight killed 4 billion American chestnuts in the early 1900s. This site is one of the few remaining mature reproducing groves in the country.
After protests, Nscale denied plans to bulldoze the nursery and announced it will transplant the trees to a new location.
This, despite the fact that the American Chestnut Foundation knows of no successful relocations of mature American chestnuts. One of its experts called the plan โludicrous.โ
Nscale is within its rights and has a massively complex construction schedule to meet.
But come on.
The grove is ๐ญ.๐ฎ ๐ฎ๐ฐ๐ฟ๐ฒ๐, ๐ผ๐ฟ ๐ฌ.๐ฌ๐ฑ๐ฏ% ๐ผ๐ณ ๐๐ต๐ฒ ๐๐ผ๐๐ฎ๐น ๐๐ถ๐๐ฒ. Itโs located on the edge of the development.
Why not just build around it? Why not designate it a conservation area and name it โAmerican Chestnut Data Centerโ?
Saving 20 trees would have cost almost nothing and earned a ton of goodwill. Instead, weโve got another story about evil data centers. And this one is deserved.