Technical issues made it difficult for everyone who attended a data center meeting in eastern Kentucky on Wednesday to hear the details.
After a sometimes tense public meeting at Boyd County High School, TeraWulf released a slideshow with details of its proposal for the Muskie Data Campus.
The 285-acre site, about 20 miles west of Ashland, will eventually host a 1 gigawatt data center, one of the largest in development statewide.
Maryland-based TeraWulf says the project will generate $300 million in local tax revenue in the first 15 years. That would not, however, include taxes on tenant server equipment inside the data center.
TeraWulf’s tenants, which could be large tech companies like Meta or Google, could seek a state exemption from taxes on their equipment.
TeraWulf promises hundreds of construction jobs in the next five years during the Muskie campus buildout, with a priority on local workers. There would be 100 full-time positions once the campus is operational.
TeraWulf’s proposal became public late last month, at a time when data center projects statewide are receiving scrutiny and pushback.
Communities have considered or enacted measures to slow data center development amid concerns about electricity and water consumption, air and noise pollution and land use.
TeraWulf has a 20-year power purchase agreement with Kentucky Power for the site. The company says Kentucky Power’s existing customers would not see their bills increase.
The plan has full oversight by the Kentucky Public Service Commission and the state attorney general’s office, TeraWulf says.
TeraWulf says its closed-loop cooling system will only need to be filled once and replaced every 10 years. It also says the noise from the facility will fall below the federal standard for safe daily exposure.
The region’s residents have reasons to be skeptical. TeraWulf plans to build the data center on a site where an aluminum rolling mill was proposed. The state approved $15 million in incentives in 2017 to build the facility, which ultimately fell through.
More recently, Century Aluminum had proposed to build a smelter in northeastern Kentucky, the first nationwide in decades. Last year, the aluminum smelter went to Oklahoma instead.
The region has lost residents, and big employers have cut jobs. A steel mill closed, and the decline of coal production and transportation led to a further reduction in the workforce.
