Just west of the Deakins line — the nearly straight-lined border separating western Maryland and West Virginia — U.S. Route 219 winds up and down mountains, past small communities and the self-proclaimed “smallest church in the lower 48.” Forests of red spruce, eastern hemlock and American beech crowd the two-lane highway, breaking slightly for meadows of wildflowers and apple trees. A slice of idyllic Appalachian landscape if there ever was one.
Continuing south, eventually tall brick buildings appear, seeming to be cut from an historic mid-Atlantic powerhouse like Baltimore or Philadelphia and pasted in the stillness of the wilderness. A place once destroyed by fire that later saw its industry vanish, Thomas, WV, stands defiantly tall. Now, it’s a city upon a hill for communities throughout the Mountain State struggling to chart their own path.
Thomas, along with its sister town, Davis, sits along the beautiful Blackwater River known for its leached tannin waters owing to its name and color. The river meanders its way though some of the most pristine parks in Appalachia, including the famed Blackwater Falls State Park with its picturesque waterfalls, Canaan Valley Resort State Park’s wetlands and renowned ski slopes, and the Monongahela National Forest’s expansive forests and trails. Combined, the area is a hotspot for everything outdoorsy, attracting tourists from across the country and around the world.
It was this natural, raw beauty of Tucker County that drew local activist and Highland Outdoors publisher Nikki Forrester to the area.
Nikki isn’t from West Virginia originally. She lived in Virginia for some time before studying in Pittsburgh. Her drives between her new and old homes often took her through Thomas and Davis, where she says she fell in love with the area, a love that has compounded over time.
“It’s like no matter how long I’ve lived here… it still just blows my mind and fills my heart to see,” Nikki said of the area. “A day doesn’t go by that I don’t feel appreciative for that. I feel the energy of the creative community, whether it’s art or music or just people walking around on the street.”
The human-centered connection to nature, spruce forests covered with floors of moss and flowers, “gnarly weather” that blankets the region with feet of snow and the quiet dark skies overhead brought Nikki here, and continues to bring others here, too. Artists, outdoorsmen, adventurers, travelers and many in between feel a desire to call this pocket of Appalachia home.
While Thomas has always welcomed its visitors with open arms, the area has now attracted a different, more insidious kind of tourist: Fundamental Data, LLC. And this visitor hopes to make a long-lasting impact on Tucker County.
Destination data center…
Fundamental Data isn’t your typical Appalachian resident. Instead of adding its own story to the tapestry of the region, Fundamental Data prefers to hide from the public eye. The Purcellville, VA.-based company does not list its owners and has a secretive website with a simple landing page. What we do know about the company is it plans to use Tucker County’s pristine forests not for hiking, skiing or bird-watching, but to flatten and build an off-the-grid natural gas power plant to power up to 10,000 acres of data centers, a project known as the Ridgeline Facility.
These data centers are not unique. They have existed as long as the internet has, serving as centralized areas hosting networks of computer systems computing massive volumes of digital requests ranging from cloud storage cataloging our online data to libraries of streamable music, television shows and movies. Recently though, these data centers have seen exponential levels of propagation throughout the nation accompanying the explosion of data-intensive digital detritus known as artificial intelligence (AI) and enhanced machine learning.
AI itself also isn’t new. It’s a project dreamed by sci-fi authors in the mid-1900s and worked on diligently by armies of scientists and engineers. In 1997, decades of work on AI culminated in Deep Blue, an artificial chess-playing system, beating world chess champion Garry Kasparov — a first victory that signaled increased competition between the corporeal and computers.
That competition continues to intensify as AI grows more commonplace. This “intelligence” now summarizes your searches on Google, responds to your tweets with its version of “context,” and produces within seconds any image, recipe, song, website or essay you can conjure no matter how obscure.
This rapid acceleration from a niche chess-playing robot to an infinite information generator has companies across the United States seeking to corner their piece of the market; and when billions can’t be spent on creating one’s own generative AI model, millions instead can be spent on data centers to help power, process and store these new tools.
Environmental Calamity and Community Concern…
The rise in AI and data centers to house their mechanisms has coincided with a significant drain on local resources. According to a report by MIT Technology Review, AI text generation software uses the same energy as running a microwave for eight seconds, image creation uses electricity equivalent to a five-and-a-half second microwave use, and a five second generated video consumes as much energy as using the microwave for over an hour.
As generating capabilities continue to improve, the number of regular AI users will continue to increase, thereby increasing energy consumption. The International Energy Agency estimates that by 2030, the electricity demand for data centers will increase to 426 terawatt-hours in the United States, equivalent to the energy needs of 30 million homes.
It’s this energy-intensive industry and its planned expansion by Fundamental Data into Tucker County that has many people, Nikki Forrester included, concerned. Nikki, along with several of her community members, began organizing earlier this year against Fundamental Data’s plans, creating Tucker United to voice local concerns and fight against the data center.
One of the greatest concerns shared by Tucker United is the pollution and environmental degradation of the pristine landscape surrounding the center. The data center is expected to be powered by a natural gas powerplant, an energy source that releases significant pollutants into the air, including nitrogen oxides, carbon dioxide, particulate matter and other toxins linked to an increase in respiratory issues and cancer risks. These problems can be exacerbated in an area like Thomas and Davis which exist in a valley where temperature inversions regularly stall the air, polluted or not, over the region.
Water consumption increases where data centers exist, too, as these complexes housing hundreds, if not thousands, of machines must be continuously cooled. While the coolant system is a fairly contained, continuous system, water inevitably evaporates requiring more to be drawn from local sources; and for Tucker County, which has suffered from water shortages over the last two years, community members have expressed their fear that this problem will only worsen if Fundamental Data successfully builds its data center.
Life next to a data center upends the normalcy built in a community over decades.
The BBC has reported dozens of stories from communities across the United States where these centers have appeared. In one report, a Mansfield, GA resident said her private well saw excessive build-up of sediment after Meta (Facebook’s parent company) opened a data center 1200 feet from her home. “I‘m afraid to drink the water, but I still cook with it and brush my teeth with it,” the woman told a BBC reporter. “Am I worried about it? Yes.” This woman’s “perfect spot” was upended by the business ventures of her detrimental next-door neighbor.
In northern Virginia’s Loudoun County, home to the largest concentration of data centers in the world, life for residents has similarly been upended due to the corporate intrusion, BBC reported. The quiet air of a peaceful neighborhood was replaced by a continuous, 24-hour humming sound emitted from an Amazon data center. “There are no birds around here anymore,” a man told a BBC reporter. “This is a beautiful, great place to live, but if this type of development continues to happen, and they allow it to encroach. They are eroding what makes this a great place to live,” another woman said.
Similarly, Nikki is worried how the environmental impacts of Fundamental Data’s Ridgeline Facility will impact Thomas’ booming tourism economy. “[Tourism is] like one of the biggest drivers of our economy here. It’s growing every year,” Nikki said. “In 2023, we brought in over $85 million in revenue from tourism. It supports 900 local jobs here in Tucker County. How will all of that be impacted by this facility coming in?”
“I can’t see a future in which you would have this facility and a thriving tourism economy when your tourism economy is based on the natural beauty of this place,” Nikki said of the Ridgeline Facility. “This will be bad for all of our local small businesses that people have poured their hearts and souls into developing and growing over the years.”
Fundamental Data’s process so far has been as shadowy as its online and in-person presence, and the state government has had little information to alleviate local concerns. To field responses to these concerns expressed by her community, Nikki reached out to a company spokesperson directly.
“I basically said, ‘Hey, folks are really concerned here. They have a lot of questions about what you want to build, how it’s going to impact our air and our water and our quality of life and our tourism economy and all these things,’” Nikki recalled. “He was pretty dismissive of our concerns.”
The spokesperson, Casey Chapman, told Nikki he would speak to the community after his company received its air permit from the state’s Department of Environmental Protection. Once that permit was approved earlier this year, Nikki reached out again. “I went back after the air permit was issued and said, ‘Hey, you said you’d come speak to us. When are you going to come down?’ We offered to have a meeting to discuss ways that could work to host a public meeting, and he hasn’t taken us up on any of those offers and has yet to come speak with us.”
The enshitification of art and a warning…
Having discussed the environmental concerns data centers like Fundamental Data’s Ridgeline Facility has for communities where they are proposed or have been built, another argument exists for why these facilities should be halted: the enshitification of art.
As mentioned, Thomas and Davis are cities upon a hill… places that defied their perceived destinies to be dying small towns in an ever-crippled Appalachia. Rather than resign to its fate, these towns reinvented themselves into artist havens, hosting galleries, artists-in-residence and inviting creatives to call this place home. Inspired by the wilderness throughout Tucker County, several artists have seen their careers explode from this little hamlet.
AI generation is the antithesis of an artist community. One of the largest contributing factors for artificial intelligence’s rise has been the use of generated art. No skill needed, no patience, no trial and error, no honing of a skill and craft, no unique style: nothing needed by a prompt, 30 seconds as the image generates and the electricity and water wasted to create it. The result may be a low quality, mass-produced, uncanny image, but for some that is okay.
For the artists, though, this generative “art” aims at upending their own business models where they often rely on small contracts for logo designs, skillfully-drawn merchandise and other micro-projects that both sustain local art and add personality to local business.
With data centers threatening the natural environment through increased air pollutants, light and noise pollution disrupting the wildlife in the area, straining of local water and electricity resources and the promulgation of low-quality, mass-produced “art,” what will be left for communities like Thomas and Davis? If the tourists leave, the adventurers seek greener pastures and artists are forced to surrender the pen, how will these cities continue to see growth?
What becomes of the city upon a hill if it allows everything that has provided it with success to be destroyed by one private for-profit company and its data center? This is a David and Goliath moment for Appalachia. Will Goliath, who has had its stranglehold on our region for our entire history win out, or will David defeat the giant, marking a new, human-centered future to come?
