The rumors started swirling a few months ago. Chateaugay, a small farming town in northern Franklin County, may soon get a data center. But little was known about the project, including who was behind it and what stage of development the data center was in.
Chateaugay joins a growing list of towns across the country that developers are eyeing as demand for data processing sites grows amid the artificial intelligence boom.
Last Monday evening, dozens of people showed up at the Chateaugay town board meeting looking for answers about the potential project. Turnout was so much higher than normal that the meeting was moved to a larger room.
Paula King, who lives in Chateaugay, was among those who expressed some skepticism about the project. "I am all for local development, but I like to be sure that we’re mitigating any harm to the environment, to the people that live within the communities and that we maximize benefits from this," said King.
Details of the proposed project
The property where the potential data center would be built is a few miles south of downtown Chateaugay. The 19-acre property is the site of a former wood chip factory. In 2022, Joseph Church from Plattsburgh purchased the property for $500,000.
Church is a veterinarian and a former partner at the Plattsburgh Animal Hospital, where he worked for more than two decades. According to his LinkedIn, Church is also the founder and CEO of New York GreenCloud, a company focused on "developing data center infrastructure powered by renewable energy.”
A year after he bought the property, Church presented his data center proposal to the Chateaugay town board. According to his company's website, the data center could consume up to 15 megawatts of power, which is much smaller than the project currently under review in nearby Massena, which would be designed for 635 megawatts.
Developer of the site in Chateaugay faces problems
When it was first proposed, Chateaugay Town Supervisor Don Bilow said he was open to it.
"When they presented the project, it looked like a nice project, but now we’re starting to get doubts about it," said Bilow after last week's meeting.
Bilow said he hasn’t heard anything from Church in three years. Church also did not respond to multiple requests for comment for this article. Along with the site in Chateaugay, Church is also planning to build a data center at the Buena Vista biomass plant in Amador County, California.
A local newspaper reporter from the Ledger Dispatch in northern California interviewed Church earlier this spring and asked about the project in Chateaugay. Despite it being listed as "in construction" on his company's website, Church admitted that the project has been stalled.
"The problem with Chateaugay- it’s not abandoned due to any issues; it's that the site is not in the condition that Buena Vista was in," said Church.
There was some work done on the site in Chateaugay a few years ago. Church hired an electrical company from Clinton County, but according to public court records, he never paid the company, so they sued.
A judge ordered Church to pay back more than $38,000. In recent years, he has also been sued by two credit card companies over unpaid debt. In those two cases, Church was ordered to pay back a combined $54,000.
Skepticism and fears arise over the proposed data center
When he was interviewed earlier this spring, Church said he was still hopeful his business will take off, and he claimed that the community in Chateaugay was supportive of his project.
"Chateaugay welcomes the restart of that place," said Church, later adding that "they would love to see it come back."
But that’s not an accurate reflection of the local sentiment now that more people are aware of the project. According to some who were at Chateaugay’s town board meeting last week, most commenters were either skeptical of the data center or against it.
"I fear that there’s too much unknown with what a data center is actually capable of," said Cecilia Merrill.
Her top concern is about the environmental impact of a data center. Along with requiring a lot of power, data centers also need a lot of cooling capacity. The property Church owns is about 1,000 ft. from the Chateaugay River, where Merrill goes fishing about five times a week.
"The brook trout in it are still thriving; they’re beautiful," said Merrill. "There’s wild fish in there, and there’s a color pink on some of them that I’ve never seen on any other spectrum of light.”
She’s worried all that would be at risk if a data center was built near the river.
Meanwhile, some others at the meeting said the area needs more industry. Griffon Wilde, who owns property in Ellenburg Center, said she is skeptical of the project, but she’s also sympathetic to the local economy.
"There needs to be new industry coming here. There needs to be more opportunities for people to be something other than prison guards," said Wilde. "There’s got to be more coming in for this place to survive.”
"It sounds like there's still time for Chateaugay to potentially stop something like this," added Wilde, "or at least make sure that it will be a positive and bring enough jobs to make it worth it."
Drafting up a moratorium
At its meeting last week, the Chateaugay town board heard about 30 minutes of public comment on the potential data center. In the end, the board agreed to work on a one-year moratorium that would ban any data centers from coming to town.
There is currently a statewide moratorium in effect, but it only applies to projects larger than 50 megawatts, so it would not apply to the proposed project in Chateaugay.
After a local moratorium expires, town supervisor Don Bilow said if a data center is officially proposed in the future, he’d treat it like any other development.
"Any project, we always look at it and go from there. If it looks like it’s going to benefit the community, we definitely move forward," said Bilow, "and if it's not, we probably aren't interested."
Karlos Rene Ayala from the Ledger Dispatch contributed reporting to this story.