By Jim Ross
For HDMedia
Point Pleasant — The first phase of the Monarch Compute Campus north of Point Pleasant should be in operation early next year with 700 people working there, the project’s supervisor said Wednesday.
The data center and gas-fired power plant along W.Va. 62 near the Camp Conley community will be “transformative for West Virginia and the region,” Dan Shapiro, chief power and energy officer of Nscale Energy & Power, said in a telephone interview.
In March, Nscale Global Holdings, a major tech startup based in the United Kingdom and backed by Nvidia, Nokia, Dell and other major players, purchased the company developing the Monarch Compute Campus AI project.
Nscale’s announcement said it had signed an agreement to acquire American Intelligence & Power Corp., sponsored by Fidelis New Energy and 8090 Industries, including the Monarch campus, “with plans to build one of the world’s largest AI Factories.”
The Mason County operation will have a mix of blue-collar and high-tech workers on site, Shapiro said.
Shapiro was in the Point Pleasant area Tuesday along with executives of other companies involved in the project. They included the CEOs of Caterpillar, which is supplying the generators to produce electricity for the complex, and Babcock & Wilcox. The president of Powell Industries, which produces switchgear structures, was also there, Shapiro said.
“We’ve got a lot of made-in-America content,” he said.
Nscale plans to build a hyperscale data center in Mason County that will have a smaller impact on the environment than large data centers of older design, Shapiro said in the interview. Its closed-loop system for water use will have minimal impact on water resources, and the power generation system will use best-in-class emission controls, he said.
Based on experience in other communities with large data centers, there have been concerns expressed by Mason County residents about noise pollution from the data center. Shapiro said those data centers were built 10 to 15 years ago, and noise abatement measures have improved since then. Noise-reduction equipment in the data center will be similar to that used in hospitals, Shapiro said. Also, buildings will be insulated to reduce noise, and berms and trees will be used outside the buildings to block noise that does escape, he said.
What’s next
Nscale is only “weeks away” from beginning construction on the data center, Shapiro said. Construction should be finished by the end of this year. Early next year, the first power generation should produce about 2 gigawatts of power — about the same as a large coal-burning power plant. The data center will us about 1.35 gigawatts in its operation. About 30% of the electricity used by a data center is needed for cooling, he said.
Shapiro did not have a timeline for when the second phase of construction and operation of the data center will begin. At full buildout, the center’s power plant will burn enough gas to produce 8 gigawatts of electricity, of which 6.7 gigawatts will be used for computing and AI.
During Tuesday’s meeting organized by members of the House of Delegates, Nscale presented checks to three local agencies, Shapiro said:
- $250,000 to the Mason County Sheriff’s Department
- $150,000 to Mason County EMS
- $50,000 to the Mason County Economic Development Authority to improve technology for business recruitment
“We want to make sure we’re supporting before we show up,” Shapiro said.
Point Pleasant Mayor Amber Tatterson attended Tuesday’s meeting of community and political leaders. They were told the data center would not affect local utilities, she said.
She acknowledged there is opposition in the community to the data center.
“We’re all just very hopeful that once it comes to fruition, it is what we’re being told,” she said.
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