West Virginia’s New Data Center Boom Meets Literary and Local Resistance

Data centers have become the newest flash point in West Virginia’s long contest over land, power and who gets to decide what happens next. In a Literary Hub essay, the writer links the state’s rush to welcome the facilities with the same forces of erasure that have shaped earlier chapters of Appalachian history, arguing that the projects are not simply about technology but about what survives when development arrives.

The piece opens with an encounter that is both literary and political: spammy ChatGPT-style marketing pitches for the author’s novel about a threatened landscape, echoing lines from the book about dams, memory and the persistence of the drowned. That framing matters because the novel, set in the 1960s, is presented not only as historical fiction but as a warning about recurring patterns—corporate greed, environmental destruction and political persecution—still operating in the present.

At the center of the essay is the author’s portrait of West Virginia as a place of public mountains, forests, rivers and seasons that support a web of uses and communities. The Monongahela National Forest, Dolly Sods Wilderness and Canaan Valley National Wildlife Refuge are described as part of a lived landscape where fishing, berry-picking, hunting, skiing and hiking all coexist. The argument is that this is not empty terrain waiting for outside investment, but a deeply used and loved public commons.

Against that backdrop, the article turns to Governor Patrick Morrissey, described as a MAGA Republican and a New Jersey transplant now pushing the state sharply to the right on a range of issues, including school vouchers, abortion bans, “right-to-work” laws and Christian nationalism. The essay says his administration has gone further than mere encouragement of technology investment: it has made West Virginia especially welcoming to data center development, positioning him as the country’s most pro-data center governor.

That policy shift has had concrete effects. According to the material in the essay, the Republican supermajority passed House Bill 2014 to attract microgrid facilities to the state, even though the measure is expected to raise electric rates for an already struggling and aging population. The law also allows state authorities to bypass local zoning rules and override public opposition, weakening the ability of communities to shape what gets built near them.

The most immediate example cited is a proposed $4 billion data center in Berkeley County, spread across 548 acres. The essay says local residents have resisted the project, but state officials have moved forward anyway. When people asked basic questions about water use, air quality, job creation and revenue sharing, the Berkeley County Development Authority did not provide the information they were seeking, underscoring one of the central tensions in the debate: the scale of the project versus the limited transparency surrounding it.

The author also places this fight within a broader Appalachian history of extraction and recovery. West Virginia has already lived through timber booms, mining damage and long efforts to rebuild waterways and downtowns. The essay notes that places such as Davis and Thomas have been revitalized in recent years through trail building, historical work, storefront renewal and watershed repair. The concern now is that data centers could undo that progress by consuming land, water and political attention while offering little to the communities most affected.

In that sense, the Literary Hub essay treats the data center controversy as more than a local land-use dispute. It becomes a test of whether West Virginia will continue to let outside economic powers redefine the state, or whether residents can insist that its mountains, valleys and public spaces are worth more than another wave of development. The question hanging over the article is not just what data centers will bring, but what, exactly, they will erase.