By SUZANNE DOWNING
Oct. 8, 2026 – A grove of rare American chestnut trees that supplies restoration seedlings in West Virginia has become the focus of a dispute over massive data center development, with an Alaska political connection through major donors to gubernatorial candidate Jonathan Kreiss-Tomkins.
The American Chestnut Foundation’s West Virginia chapter has warned that development around the former state tree nursery in Mason County could jeopardize trees that provide most of the nuts it collects for seedling production for the once nearly extinct tree.
The chapter identified 200 American chestnuts at the site and said their loss would significantly affect its ability to supply seedlings to members and state and local agencies. It said its repeated inquiries to the governor’s office and the state commerce office about the trees’ fate had received no response.
The controversy is drawing renewed attention because the grove could be bulldozed for data center construction. Some connect the threat to Anthropic, the company behind the Claude artificial intelligence platform.
Anthropic is the company whose executives are backing JKT for governor of Alaska.
The financial connection to Anthropic is firmly documented. On Aug. 27, West Virginia Gov. Patrick Morrisey welcomed an agreement under which Anthropic would spend approximately $45 billion over six years for computing capacity at Nscale’s West Virginia campus. His office described approximately 460 megawatts of capacity using NVIDIA’s next-generation technology.
For Alaska readers, Anthropic is already a familiar name in the governor’s race.
The Alaska Story previously reported that six Anthropic employees contributed a combined $372,000 to Kreiss-Tomkins: Drake Thomas, $100,000; Jan Leike and Daniel Ziegler, $70,000 each; Steven Bills and Evan Hubinger, $50,000 each; and Tao Lin, $32,000.
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Those contributions represent a substantial concentration of support from one company’s workforce.
Kreiss-Tomkins, a Democrat and former Sitka legislator, has proposed a moratorium on new Alaska data centers until comprehensive regulations are adopted, along with local approval requirements and protections against residential electricity increases and public subsidies. But who will be advising him on the rules and regulations concerning data centers?
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The West Virginia dispute shows some of the policy choices JKT would face as governor: how to accommodate an industry represented among his biggest donors.
The American chestnut’s history explains the stakes.
Nearly four billion once grew in eastern American forests. Their nuts fed wildlife and people, and were a mainstay of the diets of Native Americans and immigrants alike, while their straight-grained, rot-resistant wood supplied buildings, fencing, furniture and railroad ties as America grew.
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An imported Asian fungus associated with introduced Japanese chestnuts, devastated the native species. The blight was first identified in New York City in 1904 and spread through forests whose native chestnuts had little resistance.
Millions of American chestnut root sprouts still survive, but they rarely reach reproductive maturity before blight strikes again. The foundation describes the species as functionally extinct in the wild. Mature trees capable of producing nuts are especially valuable to restoration efforts.
The Mason County orchard supplies seeds for the work of bringing a once-dominant American tree back to the forest.
For now, the unanswered question is whether that seed source will be preserved as the surrounding computing industry expands.
For Kreiss-Tomkins, the Alaska question is still how independently he would regulate an industry whose employees have invested so heavily in his election. Anthropic is eager to colonize Alaska, with JKT as its key to the door.
