‘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
TL;DR
- East Fishkill, historically an IBM tech hub, is facing resident opposition to a proposed AI datacenter.
- The project, planned by Treetop Companies, could be one of the largest AI datacenters in the US, requiring approximately 1 gigawatt of power.
- Residents are concerned about the datacenter's massive electricity and water consumption, environmental impacts, and potential strain on local resources.
- Existing zoning laws in East Fishkill do not permit large data centers.
- The town issued a three-year moratorium on datacenters larger than 20 megawatts, which the developer has appealed.
- The proposed datacenter's power consumption would exceed that of the entire city of Buffalo.
- Concerns also include noise, backup generators, property values, wetlands, and the preservation of the town's rural character, with some referencing historical groundwater contamination from IBM's operations.
- New York State has since enacted a statewide moratorium on new hyperscale datacenters.
- Despite the town's tech history, the opposition is aimed at the unprecedented scale of AI infrastructure, not technology itself.