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‘This is not an anti-tech town’: backlash to datacenter in city once home to IBM

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 50 years. So when the news broke in early 2026 that a real estate developer, Treetop Companies, was exploring plans for what could become one of the largest artificial intelligence (AI) datacenters in the country, a roughly 1-gigawatt campus spanning more than 1m sq ft across about 143 acres, it se…

By the Truvace desk2 min read1 sourceJournalismTRV-2026-1401· cite & verify
‘This is not an anti-tech town’: backlash to datacenter in city once home to IBM

In brief

In early 2026, news emerged that developer Treetop Companies was exploring a roughly 1-gigawatt AI datacenter on about 143 acres in East Fishkill, New York, a former IBM semiconductor hub. The company had filed a grid interconnection request with the state grid operator, not a town application. Residents organized against it anyway, and in late June the town board unanimously adopted a three-year moratorium on datacenters above 20 megawatts.

The episode shows that communities once receptive to technology are questioning whether AI infrastructure brings enough local benefit for its demands on power, water and land. The outcome is unsettled: Treetop has appealed the moratorium as an unlawful, effectively permanent ban, and no formal application has ever been reviewed by the town.

Main points

  1. The Treetop proposal would use about 1,000 megawatts, more electricity than Buffalo, a city of about 275,000 people, while East Fishkill has about 30,000 residents.
  2. The request went to the NYISO interconnection queue, so there was no application before the town planning board.
  3. The moratorium bars new datacenters above 20 megawatts until July 2029 while officials study water and ecosystem impacts.
  4. Residents cited few lasting jobs, noise, diesel backup generators, wetlands, property values and past IBM-related groundwater contamination.
  5. New York's governor later signed a one-year statewide pause on hyperscale datacenters, which Donald Trump criticized.

The problem

A proposed 1,000-megawatt AI datacenter in a town of about 30,000 led residents to fear higher electricity rates, strain on water and the grid, and few lasting jobs, which prompted a three-year local moratorium.

The rundown

The town's history shaped the response. IBM made East Fishkill a major semiconductor manufacturing center, but groundwater contamination from chip production left several Superfund sites. Former IBM facilities still anchor the local economy at iPark 84, where a tenant seeks to expand an existing datacenter by about 150 megawatts, far smaller than Treetop's plan.

Residents say they are not opposed to technology and object to the scale. Organizers said months of public pressure turned a discussed seven-month pause into a three-year moratorium, even though existing zoning did not list standalone datacenters as a permissible use.

Treetop's attorneys submitted a 17-page objection arguing that the moratorium unlawfully targets its property and is effectively a permanent prohibition rather than a legitimate temporary planning measure. The state and federal reactions show that the dispute has become part of a wider political argument over datacenters.

Sources

  1. JournalismThe Guardian2026-10-09

The debate