If you drive outside the city of Campton, population less than 400, the low industrial noise of crypto mining rises from the trees. Step closer, and the source comes into view: squat metal buildings that look like shipping containers arrayed in a semicircle, thrumming with fans and processors. There’s chain-link fencing, security cameras, and two guards sitting in pickup trucks just beyond the wire.

There are steel shipping containers like this all over these hills, right where the old coal mines once stood. And inside, specialized computers race to solve complex math problems—competing to verify bitcoin transactions and earn slivers of digital currency as a reward.

For a brief moment, in 2021, it felt like the region had found its next boom—and it had Bitcoin written all over it. At its peak, Kentucky accounted for some 20 percent of the collective computing power dedicated to proof-of-work cryptocurrency mining in the US.

But booms, here, have a history. And so do busts. Local officials say it is hard to pin down the exact number of crypto mines still active in eastern Kentucky because state regulations are light and there’s a general lack of transparency in the industry. But what is clear, locals say, is that the boom has begun to recede.

“ They’d constructed on someone else’s land, or they would be paying a host company to provide the physical plant,” alleges Anna Whites, a lawyer who represented a roster of crypto mining clients. “So they’d pay the down payment or they would convince the landowner to pay the down payment, and then they would mine the first three months and then they’d go into the next billing set cycle, go almost to the end of it and then disappear.”

In early 2022, when Mohawk Energy initiated a crypto mining project in Jenkins, Kentucky, local officials said this time it would be different. Cofounded by Kentucky senator Brandon Smith, Mohawk purchased a sprawling 41,000-square-foot building and the 8 acres around it. It leased most of it to a Chinese crypto mining company, and the rest of the building included classrooms and hands-on training centers that were supposed to teach locals how to repair iPads, maintain Bitcoin rigs, and build skills for a digital economy. It was a big deal for Jenkins. A local PBS station ran a story about the launch. The images showed tool kits, workers, and smiling officials.

“The plan with Mohawk was to employ retired coal miners and disabled veterans who were back in eastern Kentucky and couldn’t find work, and train them,” said Whites, who counts Mohawk as one of her clients. Among other things, the project promised near-six-figure salaries and a vow to put some of the mining proceeds into the training program, to help grow it. And for a time, it worked.

Whites said that for a brief moment—about 18 months—things looked promising. Twenty-eight families saw real gains: One person from each family landed a permanent job, and about 30 more relatives found work nearby. But when we asked where things stood now, she paused. “I believe most of them are unemployed again.”

The unraveling came quickly. The Chinese partner sued for breach of contract. Mohawk counter-sued. And the shared crypto profits never materialized. Now, as some Kentucky residents have soured on bitcoin mining, they’ve started to speak about AI data centers in the same way they used to talk about coal seams and hash rates: with a kind of cautious hope. AI, they say, could bring jobs, fiber optics, and permanence.

Colby Kirk runs a nonprofit called One East Kentucky, focused on bringing economic development to the region. He remembers the moment the conversation shifted, back in April when he was in Paducah for the Kentucky Association for Economic Development’s spring conference.

“They had some site selection consultants that were on the panel, and they were talking about data centers,” he recalls. “And they talked about this I-81 corridor up through Pennsylvania where there’s all kinds of these big data centers. And they talked about whether our communities could prepare for some of these kinds of investments? And the consultant was like, here’s kind of what it takes.”

What it takes, it turns out, is no small feat: flat land, lots of power, fiber connectivity, and a workforce that can wire and weld. As fate would have it, the number of welders in the area, according to regional economic development organization One East Kentucky, is about twice the national average, which stands to reason, because wherever there’s metal and stress—and there’s a lot of both in coal mines—welders are the people who keep it all from falling apart.

The old infrastructure is still there too; substations, hardened ground, cooling systems, and power-hungry hardware just waiting to be switched back on. “Maybe a data center or something is a part of the puzzle,” Kirk said.

So, at the conference, when the panel ended and the floor opened to questions, Kirk says he asked the one he couldn’t stop thinking about.

“You know, 50, 60 years ago it would take a room bigger than my office to power a computer, and now I’ve got a computer I carry around in my pocket that’s more advanced than what we sent astronauts to the moon with,” he recalls asking. “Are these data centers going to keep taking up million-square-feet buildings with 30- and 40-foot ceilings, or are we gonna be left with an abundance of warehouse or industrial-scale buildings that we won’t be able to keep up?”

The consultant, he claims, didn’t have a good answer. “And that’s the thing,” Kirk says. “We don’t know what the future’s going to hold when it comes to this stuff.”

That kind of ambiguity doesn’t sit well with Nina McCoy. She’s a former high school biology teacher from Inez, a coal town made famous in 1964 when President Lyndon Johnson used it to generate support for his War on Poverty.

“This is going to sound awful,” she says, “but if they’re putting it here, then that means it’s bad. We’ve lived here long enough to see that that is how it works. You put those things that you don’t want in your neighborhood in a place like this.”

Her skepticism is rooted in lived experience: In October 2000, a massive coal slurry spill from a mine site upstream poisoned the Coldwater Fork stream, which runs behind her house. People in Inez couldn’t drink water from the tap 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 this day, many in Inez still don’t trust the tap water.

So when McCoy hears the hype about AI, she hears something else: another promise that comes with a cost. “We’ve allowed these people to be called job creators,” she said. “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 profit leaves a footprint.

AI data centers demand staggering amounts of energy—a ChatGPT search uses up to 10 times more energy than a regular Google one—and they run hot. To keep them cool, these facilities consume billions of gallons of water every year. Most of that evaporates, but residents are wary because they have had problems with facilities and their runoff in the past, so they worry these new facilities could affect fish and disrupt the land. The very things the residents of Kentucky hope to preserve.

Still, some locals see potential, even progress.

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

Hamilton claims there is a path forward where data centers bring in investors, engineers, maybe even companies willing to stay. All the AI people in the world would be steaming into Kentucky, Hamilton says. And while he admits to losing a fortune in crypto ventures in the past, he claims this is different.

When Bitcoin first arrived, lawmakers offered generous tax breaks to lure miners. Companies investing more than $1 million were exempted from paying sales taxes on hardware and electricity. And then, in March 2025, Kentucky governor Andy Beshear took all that and went a step further by signing a “Bitcoin Rights” bill into law.

The legislation, cast as a defense of personal financial freedom, is designed to enshrine the right to use digital assets in Kentucky. An earlier draft went further, aiming to bar local governments from using zoning laws to restrict crypto mining operations—a provision that drew resistance from environmental groups. That language was eventually tempered, but the intent remains: to signal that, in Kentucky, digital extraction can keep humming.

Which is why we found ourselves outside this facility in Campton, staring at this semicircle of metal buildings nestled in the trees. The mines run all night and all day, even Sundays. And the question some are asking now, with bitcoin hovering around $100,000 and big miners talking about pivoting to AI, is whether bitcoin mining gets a second wind in Kentucky.

Mohawk’s bitcoin mining may even make a comeback. Anna Whites said the parties are supposed to go into arbitration May 12th. “I’m hopeful,” she told 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.’”