‘This is not an anti-tech town’: backlash to datacenter in city once home to IBM
Fight in East Fishkill, New York, part of a growing divide over whether AI benefits outweigh enormous downsides For decades, East Fishkill helped build New York’s tech industry. The hamlet, located 70 miles north of New York City, was home to a 460-acre campus where IBM researched and manufactured semiconductor chips for nearly fifty years. Continue reading...
In East Fishkill, a town once renowned for its ties to IBM and other tech giants in New York, a fierce opposition to a massive AI datacenter development has emerged. The proposed 1-gigawatt campus, spanning over 143 acres, would have dwarfed the town's current power consumption and sparked concerns over environmental impacts. Residents, educators like Tanya Radford, and advocates rallied against the proposal before any permit was filed, citing the absence of datacenter zoning laws and the potential strain on local resources.
The developers appealed the three-year moratorium on new datacenters, but the controversy highlights a growing national debate over the true value of AI infrastructure.
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