56 year old Chestnut trees, said to be one of America’s last remaining Chestnut Groves, at risk of being wiped out by datacenter labelled as: ‘One of the largest single AI infrastructure investments in US history’
In 1904, a necrotrophic fungus called chestnut blight began devastating North America’s native chestnut trees. This fungus, brought across the Pacific on chestnut trees from Japan and China, attacks tree bark and kills the above-ground portions of susceptible trees. The disease eventually wiped out billions of chestnut trees across the US. More than a century later, a grove of approximately 200 blight-resistant American chestnut trees in West Virginia is facing the threat of being cleared to make way for a large-scale artificial intelligence data center.
Planted in the 1970s, the 56-year-old trees are a valuable source of genetic material that could help restore the species.
