First crypto, now AI: How tech is reshaping this North Carolina town

In Murphy, North Carolina, a peaceful mountain town once defined by birdsong and swaying trees, a steady electric hum cuts through the calm. The noise from a nearby cryptocurrency mine has intruded on Rebecca and Tom Lash’s lives since it opened in 2021.

“There was nothing in this little pasture but these electric lines,” Rebecca Lash said, as she and Tom stood on the hill overlooking the mine. “And it was just nice and quiet.”

The Lashes came to Cherokee County eight years ago to settle down and enjoy their older age in view of the Blue Ridge Mountains. They grew more and more incensed as three cryptocurrency mines opened near their home within the last five years. 

Now, the landscape is shifting again as one of those mines becomes an artificial intelligence data center.

Western North Carolina is seeing a local manifestation of a national trend. Across the country, communities that spent years trying to stop cryptocurrency mines are confronting a new and potentially larger wave of digital infrastructure that powers AI. As profits from crypto mining have fallen, the companies behind it have begun converting their operations into facilities designed to handle the computing that underpins that burgeoning industry. 

“The big AI centers and the big data centers, there’s some horror stories about people that live near those,” said Tom Lash.

This transition is triggering a growing backlash. Residents and local officials in Cherokee County and beyond fear that these immense operations — which consume as much electricity and water as small towns — will alter rural communities with few land-use restrictions. Towns and counties across western North Carolina have begun passing moratoriums and considering new regulations as they scramble to respond to an industry many say arrived faster than local authorities could understand or control it.

The shift is possible because crypto mines and AI data centers rely on the same underlying resources: enormous amounts of electricity, industrial-scale cooling systems, and large buildings capable of housing thousands of servers that run constantly. That infrastructure has made crypto operations attractive targets for companies racing to build AI computing capacity. 

Political and environmental conditions of Cherokee County are easing the transition, especially in post-industrial communities that need economic invigoration. In Marble, Core Scientific’s cryptocurrency mining site-turned-data-center once housed American Thread, which produced thread for the garment industry until it closed in 2015, taking hundreds of jobs and hundreds of thousands of dollars in annual taxes with it. The region’s abundant water, mild climate, and lack of zoning restrictions make it attractive. 

Late last year, Core Scientific announced plans to merge with CoreWeave, which leases computing power to AI companies. Though that deal fell through in October, Core Scientific has publicly said it is still converting facilities like the one in Marble to handle artificial intelligence workloads. That facility consumes as much power as a medium-sized town. 

Core Scientific did not respond to a request for comment. CoreWeave declined to comment.

Becoming an AI data center has required quite an expansion. According to Cherokee County commissioners and a public records request filed by commissioner Ben Adams, the company submitted a site plan last year that included more than 170 diesel generators, most of which would provide backup power. Records released by the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality after an inquiry by Grist showed that they were exempt from air-quality permitting requirements because they were classified as backup systems.

The site spreads across 250,000 square feet, or 7 acres. The company is working with neighboring utilities to meet its water and sewer needs, and it’s digging three wells to tap the local water table. The data center sought a wastewater contract with the nearby town of Andrews, but Mayor James Reid told Grist officials denied the request because the company lacked an environmental plan. 

He’s also not happy that a soccer complex Core Scientific had promised hasn’t materialized. What’s more, he thinks the facility is an eyesore.

“I wouldn’t wish this on any county or entity, ever,” said Reid. “It’s absolutely destroyed Marble.”

Taxes, at least, are back. The county received $268,000 in 2024 from the Marble facility’s last full year of the crypto operation, with a steep drop last year, mostly because of data center construction. In an email, County Tax Assessor Teresa Ricks said her office is working with a contractor to appraise the value of the Marble data center and its equipment in hopes the community will receive every cent it’s entitled to.

Adams doesn’t think the revenue is worth the impact the operation has on the community. He ran on an anti-crypto campaign in 2022. Although he wants to lure new business, he doesn’t want to see the county’s rural nature change and worries the data centers will bring noise and pollution. During a commissioners’ meeting in January, he begged his colleagues to renew a moratorium on crypto mining that expired a year ago and include AI data centers in the restriction.

“If we don’t do something, our little peaceful town’s going to turn into something else and people are going to come here looking to put stuff in our town,” he said at the time.

Another commissioner expressed concern that the Trump administration’s efforts to discourage local regulation of AI would hamstring any county action. “It would require a tremendous amount of resources, money to fight that back,” one commissioner said.

In the end, nothing happened that evening. 

But Cherokee County’s circumstance has alarmed communities throughout the region. Since January, officials across western North Carolina — in towns like Boone and Clyde, and counties like Swain and Clay — and the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians have adopted temporary bans or moratoriums on new data centers. In Canton, where a recently decommissioned paper mill might become a data center, the town council approved a moratorium in February before a crowd so large it couldn’t fit in the town hall building. The temporary bans, like the one that existed in Cherokee County from 2024 to 2025, are meant to give communities breathing room as they consider more permanent limits.

Like Canton’s ordinance, many of the moratoriums were passed before any formal data center proposals emerged. In April, Democratic state representative Lyndsey Prather introduced legislation that would scale back incentives for data centers and require them to pay the full cost of their energy use.

The tide is also beginning to turn against these operations elsewhere in the U.S. Lawmakers in Maine are considering a statewide ban, and similar bills are under consideration from New York to Oklahoma to Michigan. But as Cherokee County shows, a moratorium can come and go without a clear result, even as data center construction continues to hum. 

Adams, who is in his final year in office, is reconvening the county planning board to explore ways to limit new data centers without imposing zoning laws. A pro-business conservative, Adams said he has struggled to reconcile his support for economic growth with what he sees as a need to preserve the county’s rural character and manage its rapid transformation.

“I do believe, one, that we are stewards of our property,” Adams said. “Two, I think we can’t possibly keep out all these bad elements coming in. Three, growth is inevitable, but I hope that we can maintain it and keep it more of a peaceful community.”