Eco-Yotta Presents Business Plan to Oneonta Board, Criticizes Process

Community Resistance Grows More Organized Ahead of New Board Swearing-in

By ERIC SANTOMAURO-STENZEL
ONEONTA

Eco-Yotta Inc. executives Prashanth Gorantala and Tirusha Dave offered their most comprehensive presentation yet to Oneonta’s town board last Tuesday, December 9, hoping to earn requisite support for their controversial proposed artificial intelligence research center. Some board members expressed appreciation for the new depth of detail.

The specially scheduled meeting for the presentation, which did not include public comment and lasted around two hours, covered some site plans, cash flow estimates, electricity and water usage, technologies that will be used, local partnerships, changes over the proposal’s history, and more. The presentation came after more than half a year of community resistance, exchanges between the town and developers, and several project revisions.

The following day’s regularly scheduled town board meeting—the last of the year—was canceled due to snow. The same day, December 10, Eco-Yotta wrote to the board requesting they schedule a special meeting before the end of the year to take the next procedural step, noting “serious concern” of “bias” from January’s incoming town supervisor, Will Rivera, who has advocated against data centers coming to the area. At press time, a town board special meeting agenda for December 17 did not include the Eco-Yotta project.

“I work for the people of Oneonta, not developers,” Rivera said in a statement to AllOtsego. “I am open to all presentations related to economic development but as I have said from the beginning, I am against any harmful industrial project and illegal spot zoning. If EY wants to call that bias—then sure, it’s bias in favor of the town I was elected to represent.”

“We have a simple and sincere vision to build a modern agricultural project that supports local farming, keeps jobs, collaborates with SUNY and other schools, and contributes to the long term economic health of the community,” Dave said in opening the presentation.

In additional presentation statements shared only in writing with the board, Eco-Yotta laced into the “fairness and integrity of this process,” criticizing a petition circulated against the project and statements from Rivera describing the project as a “massive data center.” (At the time of the cited July 31 Facebook post, Eco-Yotta’s application documents referred to their project as a “data center,” language also used in a memorandum of understanding with SUNY Oneonta recently published by AllOtsego.) The company’s attorney, TJ Ruane of Whiteman Osterman & Hanna, also submitted a letter alleging their application “is not being reviewed or considered in compliance with New York State Law or Town Code.”

Eco-Yotta’s project aims to turn the approximately 10,000-square-foot barn at 357 County Highway 9 into an AI research facility that uses the heat of computers to grow hydroponic crops. They told the board that their project aims to cancel out wasted expenses through the combination, making hydroponic farming profitable by eliminating winter heating costs.
The Planned Development District rezoning application for about 153 acres filed on October 3, Eco-Yotta’s third project version, said it would use 3,000,000 kWh of electricity per year. Gorantala told AllOtsego that number was a maximum, and a closer estimate is 584,000 kWh per year. At the presentation, Gorantala said the AI server cluster would use a maximum of 70 KW, likely closer to 30 or 40 KW on average.

Gorantala also addressed water usage concerns, saying “there is no issue.”
“We have well water here that’s more than sufficient. And because [the project] is a closed loop, everything, we are not using a lot of water,” Gorantala said.

Gorantala and Dave said they will no longer be doing the first phase of the project, which would have tested heat output in the property’s home garage, because of lost time and their recent consultation with a company that already had the answers they would have been searching for.

In response to concerns that the application would allow expansion across the large property, the married couple also said they would be amenable to formally restricting the project scope to the property’s existing buildings. A site plan they presented showed the hydroponic farming would take up a majority of space in the barn.

By year five, Eco-Yotta’s business plan estimated 22 to 28 full-time jobs and more than 100 student internships. They estimated $4.5M+ in capital expenditures, building 1 MW+ in solar power, and a payback period of 4.8 to 6.4 years.

“I wish we had this months ago,” outgoing Democratic board member Kim Fierke said after the presentation. “We could have avoided a lot.”

Resistance to the project has grown more organized. A community meeting was held to oppose data centers at the Oneonta First United Methodist Church on December 3 and a petition against the Eco-Yotta proposal, according to organizer Georgia Smith, reached 574 total signatures as of Monday, December 15. CooperstownOneonta Indivisible has also shared information about upcoming meetings on the proposal with its members.
The petition calls for the town board to deny the project, reject “spot zoning,” implement a moratorium on similar projects, update town code “to address harmful industrial projects,” and ban “data centers and AI-related server facilities.”