Jenkins KY Data Center (pre-proposal), Jenkins, Kentucky

Diversified Gas and Oil Corp. and a real estate company called Maverick Holdings hold an option to buy 100 acres in the Gateway Industrial Park near Jenkins, in Letcher County, Kentucky, to build a 100 megawatt gas fired power station; the developers hope the power would draw a data center or a large manufacturer as a tenant, but no data center project has been proposed for the site yet. The Appalachian Industrial Development Authority, a board appointed by the judge-executives of Letcher, Floyd, Knott and Pike counties, signed a joint development agreement with the two companies in March 2026, starting an 18 month window to seek grants and market the site to users including hyperscale data centers.

Diversified owns a 20 inch interstate gas pipeline running through the 260 acre park, a reclaimed surface mine, with a large compressor station, and Colby Kirk of the regional development group One East Kentucky said it makes more sense to burn that gas locally than pay to repressurize it for the trip north to Pittsburgh and Cleveland. "Power grids are strained nationwide, so speed to power is becoming more and more important," Kirk said. Byron Gary of the Kentucky Resources Council said the local utility is the bigger problem: "Kentucky Power Co. has been capacity shy for a number of years now. They don't have enough capacity to serve their current customers."

The authority met privately with Diversified at Jenkins City Hall for 30 minutes on January 21, 2026, and offered non-disclosure agreements to its private sector board members; Kirk said he signed one, while Jeffery Justice of the Pine Mountain Partnership said none of the appointed members did. The judge-executives of Letcher, Floyd and Pike counties said in July they had not been briefed, and the city of Jenkins said on Facebook it was not involved in the planning, though city officials sit on the authority that approved the agreement.

Jenkins, a former coal company town of 1,700 people, runs water and sewer lines laid in the 1960s under a century old dam, and Kirk said it remains unclear whether the town's wastewater system could handle a hyperscale data center. The park has drawn other bidders before: MD Squared Power proposed a $1.2 billion AI data center there but has since moved to Pikeville, and HyForest LLC pitched two campuses of up to 200 megawatts for about $2 billion. Kirk called the Diversified plan the most attractive of the three but said it is still in due diligence: "I'm hopeful that they can find something that maybe works, but, you know, we have to be realistic when it's in this early stage. I'm not holding my breath."