October 10, 2026
A $20 billion AI campus could replace one of the last American chestnut groves
A grove of 200 healthy American chestnut trees stands on the site of the Monarch campus in Mason County, West Virginia. The campus will cover 2,250 acres, and its first phase is designed for 1.35 GW of AI compute.
The land belongs to the State of West Virginia. On the site of the former Clements State Tree Nursery in West Columbia, a grove of 200 American chestnuts resistant to blight now grows. According to Futurism, as of 2023, fewer than 4,300 acres of fruit-bearing American chestnuts remained in the US.
The campus and the client. Futurism calls the investment the largest in US history and values it at more than $20 billion. Nscale's page on the Monarch campus does not name a client and mentions neither Anthropic nor Nvidia Vera Rubin. Activists from the Global Justice Ecology Project claim in an Oct 2 newsletter that Anthropic is building the data center. Nscale's page does not confirm this.
The dispute over relocation. According to the GJEP newsletter, the trees are scheduled to be moved in late 2027. Activists demand the grove stay where it is, because 50-year-old trees, they say, cannot simply be transplanted.
According to activists, the trees are scheduled to be moved in late 2027, while phase 1 of the campus is set to come online in early 2028.