Nscale's Monarch Campus Threatens Rare WV Chestnut Grove

A grove of 200 blight-resistant chestnut trees in West Virginia, planted in the 1970s from wild surviving American chestnuts, sits on land now slated for the Monarch Compute Campus, a 2,250-acre, 8-gigawatt data center project meant to supply Anthropic and other AI customers, Futurism reports.

The orchard serves as the "primary seed source to restore the species across West Virginia," and the trees, the piece says, are "irreplaceable," serving as a crucial lifeline for future generations.

Monarch is being developed by Nscale "in collaboration with Nvidia and Caterpillar," with a reported capital commitment of over $20 billion. The article describes it as "one of the largest single AI infrastructure investments in US history, anchoring America's compute foundation."

The stakes read heavier against the species' baseline. The 1904 blight killed an estimated 4 billion American chestnuts, and as of 2023 fewer than 4,300 acres of fruit-producing trees remained in the continental US. Futurism does not name a landowner, a construction timeline, or any pending local approvals.