Delaware County bitcoin mining facility raises questions

HOPKINTON — One April morning in 2025, Amy Krapfl left for work, hearing the roar of a distant jet engine.

When she returned to her home in Hopkinton at the end of the day, the noise was still there. Krapfl’s children told her they’d heard on the school bus that it was coming from a bitcoin mining facility less than a mile from where they lived.

Krapfl had seen signs of construction on the land the year before but had no idea a data center was being built there. Neither did Delaware County officials.

Alex Linderwell, the Delaware County Planning and Zoning administrator, said he approved a standard zoning permit in the fall of 2024 from a contractor who wanted to “place some containers for a project” related to a substation on land Compass Mining was leasing from a Hopkinton resident. Linderwell said county zoning regulations allow electrical substations on agricultural land.

Compass Mining – based in Wilmington, Delaware – helps customers buy bitcoin mining hardware and build mining facilities. It has bitcoin mining operations in Indiana, Minnesota, North Dakota, Texas, Ohio and Iowa.

In early 2025, the county’s roads departments told Linderwell that concrete slabs had been added to the land. Hopkinton resident Randy Fitzgerald called Linderwell in the spring of 2025 to alert the county that the facility’s fans had started running.