From Coal to Cloud: Infrastructural Enclosure and the Politics of Land in West Virginia's AI Buildout

Beneath the dramatic expansion of AI computing and digital systems across the world, data centers and energy systems are being constructed within inherited land and property institutions. Because of this, the consequences of this buildout—including resource strain and environmental and health impacts—are unevenly distributed, particularly in rural areas like Appalachia long structured by concentrated land ownership and extractive power relations. Recent discourse has focused on the implications of AI and digital systems for governance, as well as the immense resource demands of computing infrastructure. This article seeks to link these concerns by examining the unequal power relations involved in the production of computing infrastructure, including “powered land,” through which non-tech entities assemble land and entitlements as an asset for sale or rent to operators and AI labs. Within the historically extractive landscape of West Virginia, I examine the mechanisms of infrastructural enclosure that enable and sustain this asset against local resistance, including the passage of HB 2014 and HB 2002, which aim to remove local land-use authority, divert fiscal resources, and protect consequential information about proposed projects. A critical component of this process is asymmetric legibility, through which project details are made coherent for those within the development network but intentionally fragmented and obscured for affected communities. Infrastructural enclosure extends accumulation by dispossession beyond the appropriation of land and resources to encompass the historically aligned regimes that legitimize dispossession and erode democracy and collective place identity.