Andrews – Town officials have soured on a request from Core Scientific for the town to provide wastewater treatment for the massive artificial intelligence facility being developed in Marble.
Mayor James Reid said the town is “drawing back” from a proposed deal and directing its attorney to draft a letter to put the project on hold.
Cherokee County Commissioner Cal Stiles brought up the subject at Thursday’s Andrews Board of Aldermen meeting. The town needs to be careful evaluating the proposed service request, he advised.
Normally, wastewater treatment service is provided within town limits or, when such arrangements exist, within a town’s urban footprint. Core Scientific’s AI plant is in Marble, well outside the town’s shadow.
Stiles warned that dedicating significant capacity to the plant may prevent the town from supporting housing projects or industrial growth.
Those are scenarios that may come sooner than later. A factory reopening in Robbinsville is expected to employ up to 500 people. The last time that plant had that kind of workforce, when it was a Stanley Furniture plant, much of the workforce lived in the Andrews area.
Reid said the town’s wastewater treatment plant is at about 50% capacity, but planned improvements will bring that number to 40%.
Stiles said the Marble facility would employ 40-50 people and use 5,000 gallons of water per day or more. He advised the town to look at the cost to add that much capacity to the water treatment plant and charge accordingly.
The plant once employed up to 500 people when it was operated by American Thread.
Water service
The Core Scientific plant in Marble has an existing 2-inch water line connected to the Marble Community Water District but has asked for a 4-inch line, said Keith Lovin, president of the Marble water board. The Marble district has capacity for around 500 taps and has in the upper 400s now.
“Our primary goal is to take care of our existing customers,” he said.
Lovin said the Core Scientific plant has wells on site that will be used for industrial purposes. Water provided by the district would be used to support the workforce.
Core Scientific and Marble water are negotiating a proposal for Marble to tap into wells at the plant site to increase the district’s capacity. No decisions have been made.
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Core Scientific
Core Scientific operates nine data centers in development and operational stages across states including Alabama, Georgia, Kentucky, North Carolina, North Dakota and Texas. As of March, it operated about 163,000 bitcoin miners, with 156,000 being self-mined and 7,000 hosted for customers.
Core Scientific is actively converting a significant portion of its data centers to support AI-related workloads, indicating a strategic transition away from a sole focus on bitcoin mining.
Extensive construction work is underway at the former American Thread plant at 155 Palmer Lane as Core Scientific upgrades from crypto mining to hosting CoreWeave’s NVIDIA graphics processing units for high-performance computing operations.
CoreWeave is bidding to acquire Core Scientific for an all-stock $9 billion transaction, although some shareholders have raised objections that could jeopardize the deal.