PLEASE NOTE: This is a minimally-edited transcript that originates from a program that uses AI.
Anisa Khalifa: In recent years, cryptocurrency has become the biggest buzzword in the financial world.
Unidentified Speakers: The cryptocurrency scene is booming advertising. It's becoming really the true digital gold that we've all been talking about for a while with President Trump. Crypto finally has a champion and an ally in the White House.
Anisa Khalifa: And while it's been touted as a potential replacement for the almighty dollar, the digital currency is extremely volatile.
Colin Campbell: The price of Bitcoin plunging to its lowest level in 16 months.
Unidentified Speaker: One minute it looks like the market's gonna rip the next minute. It looks like the market's gonna dip, and I don't know what in the world's going on, so I'm out. No MAs.
Anisa Khalifa: But as crypto's price bounces up and down. One thing remains constant. The loud hum it takes to get it into people's digital pockets. That's the sound of a crypto mine. Yes. A a mine. It
Colin Campbell: sounds like, you know, they're digging holes for something, but No, it's, it's ultimately, basically a bunch of computer servers that are constantly running all these complex equations that power the cryptocurrency world
Anisa Khalifa: to create digital coins.
These mines need to use a lot of cheap energy and many spots in the south fit the bill.
Jane Sartwell: You know, the south is sort of this hotspot, which is so weird because crypto just doesn't seem like something that's going on in the mountains of North Carolina. But when the
Anisa Khalifa: mines set up, shop someone's backyard usually isn't far down the road.
Cindie Roberson: This is continuous noise. It doesn't go anywhere, ever.
Anisa Khalifa: I'm Anisa Khalifa. This is the broadside where we tell stories from our home at the crossroads of the South this week. The cost of crypto mining and how some communities are trying to pull the plug.
Jane Sartwell: Of all the companies that have come to North Carolina in recent years, you think Toyota, Google, Amazon, you know these crypto mining operations don't exactly spring to mind. Jane Twell is a reporter
Anisa Khalifa: for Carolina Public Press. Jane recently wrote a piece about crypto in the state and why these companies are especially drawn to the North Carolina Mountains
Jane Sartwell: in particular.
The Southern United States are a big place they're interested in just because of the sparse population and the abundant and cheap power supply. And in parts of
Anisa Khalifa: Appalachia, they've got both those things, especially the preexisting infrastructure that can help drum up affordable power, think hydroelectric dams like the ones built and operated by the Tennessee Valley Authority.
But what is a crypto mine doing that requires so much energy? Jane helped break it down.
Jane Sartwell: Basically, it looks like a bunch of storage containers full of. Computers that are attempting to solve extremely complex mathematical equations.
Anisa Khalifa: When one of these highly specialized rigs figures out an equation, it's rewarded with a digital coin.
Jane Sartwell: The effect is that it authenticates a crypto transaction, and once that equation is solved onto the
Anisa Khalifa: next one and then the next one over, and over and over again. This verification process consumes a lot of energy making one. Bitcoin the most popular type of cryptocurrency requires about 1400 kilowatts.
That same amount of energy could power an average US household for about 50 days.
Jane Sartwell: So it's extremely energy intensive to have these complex computers constantly day and night, verifying these mathematical equations. And then there's the noise. The computers get very hot trying to do this much work. Like you know when you're sitting on your laptop and it starts to burn your thighs except for like way hotter than that.
And like your laptop, these computers have fans to cool them down. But the fans are so loud. That sounds like a racetrack in your backyard, basically like a deafening white noise kind of sound.
Anisa Khalifa: That's the sound outside of crypto mine in Cherokee County on the far western tip of the state. North Carolina doesn't have a registry of crypto mines. So Jane says, it's hard to know exactly how many exist statewide. But Cherokee County has been a hub for crypto companies in North Carolina for a while now.
After China banned crypto mining in 2021, the Mountain County saw three mines set up operations.
Jane Sartwell: Then, you know, people started to freak out. Um, there were people who showing up at, you know, town council meetings. And county commissioners meeting just in tears, like couldn't sleep, couldn't enjoy their home.
You know, constant noise.
Cindie Roberson: People are tortured with noise and unrelenting noise. This is Cindy Roberson. She's a former resident of Cherokee County. That's one thing that don't think people who downplayed understand this is continuous noise. It doesn't go anywhere ever.
Anisa Khalifa: In 2022, Cindy sold her cabin in Cherokee County and moved across the border to northwest Georgia.
She says the incessant noise from the crypto mines was unbearable. Since then, Cindy has volunteered for the National Coalition Against Crypto Mining.
Cindie Roberson: It is terrible that it happened to that place. They are absolutely the poster child of the United States for what goes wrong when you invite them in
Anisa Khalifa: on top of cheap land and an abundant power supply. There's one more key component that made Cherokee County attractive to crypto companies.
Colin Campbell: Because it's so rural and because it's so conservative, uh, it doesn't have any sort of zoning rules, so it's really kind of the wild, wild west in terms of what you can do with your property.
Anisa Khalifa: Colin Campbell is the Capital Bureau chief for WNC. When he is not chasing down elected officials at the state legislature in Raleigh, Colin loves to travel across North Carolina and visit small towns. Last year he went to Murphy, the county seat of Cherokee County in the heart of the Appalachian Mountains, but he wasn't there for the gorgeous scenery.
Colin Campbell: So I was interested in checking out, uh, in part because this awful noise issue that these people were having with the crypto mines near their houses. And honestly, I wanted to hear what this sounded like for myself, uh, and go up to this weird crypto mining operation, see what it was gonna sound like.
Anisa Khalifa: And while Colin knew what was coming, what he heard was still jarring.
Colin Campbell: Immediately went to this cryptocurrency place, which is just kind of by the side of the road. It's surrounded by mountains and neighborhoods. You drive up and you almost think you're at a self-storage place. It's just a bunch of shipping containers in a field. And when I first got there, the sound wasn't going like, I guess they were doing some maintenance, so I was like, oh, this doesn't seem like it's a big deal at all.
And then I came back a few hours later and they had revved up the servers. And the minute you roll down your window, you can hear this. And this is right on the edge of this sort of picturesque mountain town with. Little restaurants and shops and sort of the usual things you'd expect in a place that markets itself to tourists.
Anisa Khalifa: A picturesque mountain town, overwhelmed by the roar of gigantic fans, cooling servers, powered by a company that Colin says is essentially a ghost.
Colin Campbell: And even for me trying to find as a journalist, like, you know, you wanna get their side of the story, talk to the people from the crypto company, uh, there's not really a contact.
You can find the context that you can find. Nobody responds and the company changes hands or changes names every couple of years. So it's, it's hard to track. Um, and so I think this, this sort of creates this kind of cultural clash in an area that really has never had to deal with an outside industry coming in and doing something.
That one doesn't create that many jobs for them. There's not a huge. Upside to a community like this from having this, uh, but there's really no way to sort of deal with it in the way that they historically have confronted their problems as a close-knit community.
Anisa Khalifa: But that changed soon after the crypto companies came to town and the noise from their minds became unavoidable.
Colin Campbell: So they came in there and a lot of the locals didn't really know what it was about initially. You know, once these things got powered up and they realized what sort of noise issues they were having, that's when the county leaders sort of figured that they had to take some kind of action to keep these from popping up on potentially every corner.
Anisa Khalifa: Now, Cherokee County with its strong libertarian streak and lax zoning laws found itself wrestling with regulation.
Colin Campbell: That was one of the challenges was the county commission in Cherokee had this menu of options, noise ordinance to zoning, and every time they would sort of propose something, they would hear an earful from their community that just did not want this type of thing.
Unidentified Speaker: This is borderline communist in my mind, telling us what we can do and what we can't do in our own property.
Unidentified Speaker: They're gonna come anywhere that they can do it. And you all are gonna be responsible and you're gonna allow it in their front yard. Who bottles that? I, I am the one that has the floor right now.
Colin Campbell: They didn't want to go in and put in zoning rules like every other county in the state has, uh, because they feel really strongly about. Property rights. It's, it's one of the most Republican, conservative, uh, counties in the whole state. And they really don't like the idea of telling each other what you can and cannot do with your land.
Uh, but at the same time, they really don't want you to be making lots of cryptocurrency noises on your land.
Anisa Khalifa: So you had a sit down conversation with a local official. Tell us who you talked with and what was his role in navigating this crypto mining issue?
Colin Campbell: So, county Commissioner Ben Adams is a surveyor.
So he's used to a lot of land use issues. Uh, very conservative Republican represents this particular area of Cherokee County. So I sat down with him at the county courthouse to kind of understand, um, you know, how they're addressing this issue.
Ben Adams: If it's your land, you should be able to do what you want. If I wanna put a pig farm on my property, I should be able to put a pig farm on my property.
But my neighbor may not want the pig farm, and then we started talking to each other. No one wants to be told what they can and can't do. On their property. And we all in agreeance with that. So that's where we said, okay, what can we do that doesn't affect that?
Colin Campbell: So they said no to a noise ordinance. They said no to countywide zoning because that would be, in their minds, too restrictive.
So instead, uh, as he described it to me, they've gone with a, a policy that basically, uh, outlines what you can't do anywhere in, uh, Cherokee County. And that includes storing nuclear waste, but also cryptocurrency mines.
Anisa Khalifa: Yep. You heard him correctly. After all that back and forth, they eventually gave cryptocurrency.
Mines a special designation, one on par with nuclear waste. In 2023. That new land use ordinance went into effect, barring any more crypto mines from coming in, but they're still left with the three operations already in place.
Colin Campbell: While they can't do anything about the two or three mines that are there already, uh, now they've basically closed the door on any future, uh, cryptocurrency, mining issues that might come up in this area.
Anisa Khalifa: Cherokee County has been a cautionary tale for other communities. Several counties in North Carolina, most of them in the mountains have banned crypto mines putting up the gates before any operations come to town. But even though crypto is a no-go in many places. Collin says another kind of tech looms on the horizon.
One that looks and sounds very similar.
Colin Campbell: Crypto is growing, but so also is artificial intelligence. And so well now we've got all these ordinances that ban crypto mining. It doesn't mention AI facilities, and so they're gonna have to sort of revisit some of these ordinances at the community level. Every time there's a new technological development that they have to kind of figure out, how do they want to handle it
Anisa Khalifa: just ahead.
AI comes to Appalachia and one community tries to pick up the pieces after a Bitcoin bust.
Dina Temple-Raston: There was sort of this disappointment 'cause they had such high hopes for what crypto might do for them. You know, help Eastern Kentucky get back on its feet and it never happened.
My name's Dina Temple Rasin, and I'm the managing editor and host of the Click Here podcast.
Anisa Khalifa: Dina and her team explore how we use technology and our place in the digital world. Recently they ventured to eastern Kentucky where mining runs deep.
Dina Temple-Raston: The whole idea of mining is kind of sacred to this community, and what surprised us is when we went to talk to them about these crypto mining companies, uh, they were kind of leveraging what was already there.
Anisa Khalifa: What was already there was an echo of a different, much more analog industry. Coal mining.
Dina Temple-Raston: When you think of coal mining, most people think of Eastern Kentucky. And for years, you know, coal was the big industry there with loss of employment. Coal just holds this place for the community. And mining more generally as well.
'cause everyone did it and their fathers did it and their grandfathers did it, and now it's pretty much gone.
Anisa Khalifa: Much like Cherokee County. Dina says Crypto companies came to Eastern Kentucky in the early 2020s looking for a place to plant their flag.
Dina Temple-Raston: A lot of the crypto miners, um, set up shop right on top of these old closed mines because once you see it, you can understand that these coal mines already have the infrastructure that crypto mines would need.
In other words, water, power lines. So you've got people who like the idea of mining that's kind of in their culture and so. They sort of glommed onto crypto mining because of that, but it turns out there's really an infrastructure reason because you need electricity going to all these mines and all these mines are closed.
It makes perfect sense to just plop something on top of it and use the existing transmission lines, maybe upgrade them and boom, Bob's your uncle. You don't need to run any lines.
But that's also where the bad news comes in. A lot of these projects dissolved pretty quickly when the price of Bitcoin fell and local utilities had done all these upgrades thinking that crypto was gonna stay and create jobs and bring prosperity back to the region, or at least bring some prosperity to the region, and it never really did.
So in this part of eastern Kentucky, what we found is it seemed like. History was just repeating itself. You know, last time it was coal that they extracted from the ground, and this time it was Bitcoins that they were sort of figuring out equations to take them out of thin air,
Anisa Khalifa: and things have changed.
Now, at one point, crypto mining was kind of the wave of the future, but now it's been replaced by something new. Right? What is that and how did that happen?
Dina Temple-Raston: The new, new thing that everybody's talking about now are these data centers, which not unlike crypto mines, could tap into the old infrastructure that they had over these coal mines, right?
To tap into that electrical grid and that sort of thing. But the idea is that data centers will. Have other companies that build up around them, so they're hoping that it can sort of attract a whole sort of technological revolution in Kentucky. The problem is data centers are loud, just like cryptocurrency miners are, and.
They are a huge electricity suck. So there are some estimates that suggest that even a single chat GPT query uses 10 times more energy than the standard Google search. And the centers also require billions of gallons of water annually to cool themselves. So there's a real concern about them coming in and sort of being crypto all over again.
Anisa Khalifa: So, I mean, given how similar, it seems like a lot of the. Sort of infrastructure and characteristics of AI data centers is to crypto mining. What is the appeal for these communities in eastern Kentucky? How is AI data centers being pitched differently from crypto?
Dina Temple-Raston: Well, they're being pitched as you know, the new, new thing that crypto is very volatile, right?
And they've seen the ups and downs of it. But AI is here to stay.
AI is in everything that we do. Siri, like chat, GPT, like robotics, like everything you can imagine has to have ai.
Dina Temple-Raston: Wes Hamilton, he's sort of a serial entrepreneur who's always into the new, new thing. Now he's trying to put together some sort of consortium that would put together an AI data center in the region.
If you can create a key bunch of data centers in Eastern Kentucky, all the AI people in the world will want to relocate their businesses in those areas.
Dina Temple-Raston: I. Everybody's talking about how they need data centers to train ai, and then there's the idea of you need all these racks for computers that'll be doing all this training of large language models, and those racks need welders and.
Well, a lot of people who are in the coal mining business are incredibly good welders. They had to do it when they were in the mines. So there is a certain logic to what people are saying, but there's been a sort of carnival barker quality of people who come and go in eastern Kentucky promising them the moon and leaving them with little butt.
Ravaged environments and dirty waterways.
Anisa Khalifa: Even though Eastern Kentuckians have heard this pitch before. Dina says Locals could have a harder time banning AI companies if they don't want a data center on their doorstep. I.
Dina Temple-Raston: So interestingly, president Trump's so-called big beautiful Bill. This thing that's going through Congress now, it's in the Senate actually has a provision in it that would create a 10 year ban on local communities banning anything to do with ai really.
And this would be data centers too. And so the real concern is that these local zoning laws where. Let's say a bunch of data centers wanna come in, but it's gonna be too loud for residential areas should be out in the hinder lands where people won't hear it. The local communities won't have the power to stop these data centers from setting up right next door.
Unidentified Speaker: This is going to sound awful, but if they're putting it here, then that means it's bad.
Dina Temple-Raston: Nina McCoy is a former biology teacher in Eastern Kentucky, and, uh, she's been a real big environmental advocate in the region because, uh, she's concerned about how these companies come in, sort of take advantage of everyone and leave.
So she's had a real problem with that.
Unidentified Speaker: You put those things that you want, don't want in your neighborhood in a place like this.
Dina Temple-Raston: You know, there are some very vocal critics who say, look, the idea is when a company comes here for some reason, all of us here just bow down to the company and say that they're job creators, that they're gonna make a difference to whatever the region needs.
And in fact, you know what they've turned out to be more times than not are profit takers, not job makers. So they make a bunch of money off whatever it is, they're kind of ripping out of East Kentucky, and then they disappear.
Anisa Khalifa: What would you be paying attention to most as the story continues?
Dina Temple-Raston: I think the next big shoe to drop is an A crypto shoe.
It's an AI shoe, so I think we're gonna look for these for the expansion of AI data centers and how those are being regulated. I. There was this huge flood of crypto right in 2021 and 2022, and I think there's probably gonna be a similar flood of data centers in 2025 and 2026. And what we kept feeling like when we were in Eastern Kentucky is that there was enough skepticism that it was sort of like that who song, right?
You Don't Get Fooled again. I sort of feel like that's what's going on in eastern Kentucky now that the development people are a little more wary. The environmental people are a little more on top of it, and local people aren't buying the same bill of goods that they were sold, uh, when crypto came around.
Anisa Khalifa: Thank you so much for joining me, Dina.
Dina Temple-Raston: Thanks so much for having me, boss.
Same as the old boss.
Anisa Khalifa: If you'd like to check out Dina Temple Rasin and click Here's reporting on AI in Coal Mining Country. We've dropped a link to the podcast in this week's show notes. There you'll also find reporting on crypto mining by Jane Twell from Carolina Public Press. And my colleague Colin Campbell from WUNC.
This episode was produced by Charlie Shelton Ormond and edited by Jared Walker. Our executive producer is Wilson Sere. The Broadside is a production of WUNC North Carolina Public Radio. And as part of the NPR network, if you have feedback or a story idea, you can email us at broadside@wunc.org. If you enjoyed the show, leave us a rating, a review, or share it with a friend.
I'm Anisa Khalifa. Thanks for listening, y'all. We'll be back next week.