Fight in East Fishkill, New York, part of a growing divide over whether AI benefits outweigh enormous downsides
By Marina Dunbar, The Guardian, Fri 9 Oct 2026
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 seemed the town would welcome a new phase in its technological evolution.
Instead, a furious backlash erupted before even a single permit application was filed with the municipal government. Residents began attending town board meetings, organizing rallies and advocating for a temporary ban.
Even before any plans for the facility were drawn up, East Fishkill’s existing zoning laws did not allow for the construction of large datacenters. The town issued a three-year moratorium on them anyway, a sign of the extreme ire against datacenters.
The temporary ban, adopted unanimously in late June, forbids the town from considering new datacenters larger than 20 megawatts until July of 2029, while officials study their potential impacts on water resources and local ecosystems. The development company at the center of the controversy has appealed the measure.
“I just think that we’re at this moment where things are happening very quickly, we need to get our ducks in a row and think about the various ways in which datacenters and new energy usage will affect our long-term community cohesiveness, environmental quality, and character,” said East Fishkill resident and professor Tanya Radford.
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