A campaign to protect American chestnut trees in Mason County, West Virginia, is colliding with one of the largest data center buildouts in the country.
The American Chestnut Foundation’s West Virginia chapter said in its April 2026 newsletter that most of the nuts it collects for seedlings come from the former state tree nursery in Mason County. The chapter wrote that land around the nursery had been bought for a data center, and that questions to the governor’s office and the commerce office about whether the trees would be affected went unanswered. In March, Gov. Patrick Morrisey announced that the Mason County property was tied to an NVIDIA-backed computing campus.
Separate advocacy posts this week claim a grove of about 200 blight-surviving wild American chestnuts faces bulldozing for an Anthropic-related data center. That figure comes from campaign material, not from a state environmental filing reviewed for this story. It should be treated as an advocate’s count until the developer or the state confirms it.
What is confirmed is the scale of the projects. Morrisey’s office said Anthropic agreed to spend about $45 billion over six years for roughly 460 megawatts of computing at Nscale’s Monarch campus in Mason County. West Virginia Public Broadcasting reported a second certified project, Starwood Digital Ventures’ $12 billion Project Tamarack, also in Mason County. Morrisey said residential bills would not rise because of the announcements, and that the campuses would use closed-loop water systems.
The American chestnut was nearly wiped out by an imported blight in the early 1900s. Survivors and nursery stock are the seed source for restoration. Whether those Mason County trees are inside a construction footprint is the question the state has not publicly answered.
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