‘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, New York, a community known for its historical ties to the tech industry, a heated debate has erupted over a proposed AI datacenter. The hamlet, located 70 miles north of New York City, was once home to a 460-acre IBM semiconductor manufacturing campus, where workers spent decades researching and producing chips.
When news broke in early 2026 that a real estate developer, Treetop Companies, was considering building a 1-gigawatt AI datacenter on a 143-acre site, residents were shocked – not because they were against technology, but because of the sheer scale of the proposed project.
The datacenter would span over a million square feet and required more electricity than the entire town of Buffalo, which has a population of around 275,000. East Fishkill's population sits at 30,000, making the proposed facility an outlier in terms of energy consumption and land use. The town, however, had strict zoning laws that did not permit the construction of large data centers, leading to a three-year moratorium on new datacenter development.
In June 2026, the town board unanimously adopted a temporary ban on all datacenters larger than 20 megawatts until July 2029, giving officials time to study the potential impacts on water resources and local ecosystems. The developer, Treetop Companies, has appealed the measure and emphasized the need to consider the long-term effects of datacenters on the community's character, environmental quality, and cohesiveness.
The controversy in East Fishkill is part of a broader national discussion about the benefits and drawbacks of AI infrastructure. As communities grapple with the question of whether the economic advantages of such facilities justify their massive energy demands, infrastructure, and land consumption, the East Fishkill case serves as a cautionary tale.
Local residents are standing firm in their opposition, refusing to pay higher electricity rates for a facility that they fear would provide very few jobs and have little long-term benefit for the community.
Written by urgent.news from Guardian Technology's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
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