Kentucky’s Bitcoin Boom Has Gone Bust | EUROtoday

Her skepticism is rooted in lived expertise: In October 2000, an enormous coal slurry spill from a mine website upstream poisoned the Coldwater Fork stream, which runs behind her home. People in Inez couldn’t drink water from the faucet for months.

“Those of us living downstream didn’t hear about it for a while, but the school system had to close down for about a week until they got an alternate water source,” she says.

To at the present time, 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 price. “We’ve allowed these people to be called job creators,” she mentioned. “And I don’t care if it’s AI or crypto or whatever, we bow down to them and let them tell us what they are going to do to our community because they are job creators. They’re not job creators, they’re profit makers.”

And the revenue leaves a footprint.

AI knowledge facilities demand staggering quantities of vitality—a ChatGPT search makes use of as much as 10 instances extra vitality than an everyday Google one—and so they run sizzling. To hold them cool, these amenities devour billions of gallons of water yearly. Most of that evaporates, however residents are cautious as a result of they’ve had issues with amenities and their runoff prior to now, so that they fear these new amenities might have an effect on fish and disrupt the land. The very issues the residents of Kentucky hope to protect.

Still, some locals see potential, even progress.

“AI is in everything that we do,” mentioned Wes Hamilton, a neighborhood entrepreneur who did his fair proportion of crypto mining in Kentucky in its heyday. “Siri, ChatGPT, robotics—everything you can imagine has to have AI,” he mentioned. “Bitcoin is a one-trick pony. You create it. The only person that gets paid is the owner of the machines.”

Hamilton claims there’s a path ahead the place knowledge facilities herald buyers, engineers, perhaps even firms keen to remain. All the AI folks on the planet could be steaming into Kentucky, Hamilton says. And whereas he admits to shedding a fortune in crypto ventures prior to now, he claims that is completely different.

When Bitcoin first arrived, lawmakers provided beneficiant tax breaks to lure miners. Companies investing greater than $1 million had been exempted from paying gross sales taxes on {hardware} and electrical energy. And then, 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 non-public monetary freedom, is designed to enshrine the suitable 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, looking at this semicircle of metallic buildings nestled within the bushes. The mines run all night time and all day, even Sundays. And the query some are asking now, with bitcoin hovering round $100,000 and large miners speaking about pivoting to AI, is whether or not bitcoin mining will get a second wind in Kentucky.

Mohawk’s bitcoin mining might even make a comeback. Anna Whites mentioned the events are supposed to enter arbitration May twelfth. “I’m hopeful,” she instructed us. “I’m very hopeful that they sit down and say, ‘Mighty nice plant you have there. Let’s just go ahead and turn it on.’”