A new data center was announced in northeastern Kentucky on Tuesday.
TeraWulf, a bitcoin mining company, announced it would be building a hyperscale high-performance computing development site, or a data center, at the EastPark Industrial Park near Ashland. It will be called the Muskie Data Campus.
EastPark is part of the Northeast Kentucky Economic Development Authority, which is a regional economic development authority that represents Boyd, Carter, Elliott, Greenup and Lawrence counties.
Greenup County Judge-Executive Bobby Hall said he first heard about the project in August 2024.
“This is something that doesn't just happen overnight,” Hall said. “We're not going out here and building a Dairy Queen or a McDonald's that'll be ready in six months. There's a process to data centers.”
The data center will eventually need more than one gigawatt of electricity. One gigawatt of power could support more than 800,000 average homes for an entire year. The first 500 megawatts should be starting by the second half of 2028 and the other 500 megawatts by the second half of 2030.
Hall said the process started with a company looking for an industrial site and the group felt it had a location in EastPark that the company could use. It’s located near Interstate 64 and across the street from landfill, not near neighborhoods or in the city. He said many groups were involved in considering this project and planning to use this site for a data center.
According to TeraWulf’s press release, Kentucky Power will be building additional infrastructure in the area to support the project.
He said local leaders are they’re preparing to answer questions from the community and address pushback on the project.
Hall described the effort to get the data center as a “group project” between the five counties, the governor’s office and the state economic development authority.
“We're going to make sure that all of our people in all five counties are educated with the true answers,” Hall said. “We're also smart enough to know that no matter what our answer is, we're going to get pushed back.”
He said the number one goal in this project is to communicate and be transparent. He said the group is preparing to have town hall meetings to inform the community about the project and answer questions, but he didn’t have a timeline for when those would start.
“I think it's critical that we make sure that everybody in all five counties has an opportunity to ask their questions, to be heard,” Hall said. “I think it's important for constituents to be heard and to voice their concerns, and also to come in and say, ‘Hey, let's do this.’”
One benefit of the data center coming to the community, Hall said, is that the company has purchased the land from the government and it will be going back on the tax roll. Since the land is part of EastPark, the property taxes will benefit all five counties in the group.
The company’s press release stated it would be working to great workforce training opportunities and economic development initiatives with the data center.
“This world has changed, and we have taken a step forward to say, ‘Let's move this county forward, let's move this region forward, let's move the Commonwealth of Kentucky forward,’” Hall said.
