Kentucky’s Bitcoin Boom Has Gone Bust

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.’”