56-year-old chestnut grove, one of America’s last, at risk from AI data center

In 1904, a necrotrophic fungus called chestnut blight began devastating North America's native chestnut trees. This fungus, brought across the Pacific on chestnut trees from Japan and China, attacks tree bark and kills the above-ground portions of susceptible trees. The disease eventually wiped out billions of chestnut trees across the US. More than a century later, a grove of approximately 200 blight-resistant American chestnut trees in West Virginia is facing the threat of being cleared to make way for a large-scale artificial intelligence data center.​Planted in the 1970s, the 56-year-old trees are a valuable source of genetic material that could help restore the species. However, the proposed Monarch Compute Campus, developed by Nscale in collaboration with Nvidia and Caterpillar, could put the grove at risk.