East Fishkill bans new datacenters for three years as Treetop appeals

East Fishkill, a hamlet of 30,000 people 70 miles north of New York City, has banned new datacenters above 20 megawatts for three years.

The unanimous June 2026 vote by the town board blocks projects larger than 20 MW until July 2029. Officials adopted the moratorium before any developer filed a permit application.

What is Treetop proposing?

Treetop Companies wants to build a roughly 1-gigawatt datacenter campus spanning more than 1 million square feet across about 143 acres. The site sits on land Treetop acquired through a local entity called Donovan Drive Holdings.

The project filed its power request with the New York Independent System Operator, not with the town. NYISO manages New York's high-voltage grid and reviews every large new connection.

Treetop initially pursued approvals for a warehouse. Residents later found the 1,000-megawatt interconnection request, an amount more consistent with a large AI datacenter than a warehouse.

To put that figure in scale: 1,000 MW exceeds the electricity used by the entire city of Buffalo, which has about 275,000 people. East Fishkill has 30,000.

Why a former IBM town is resisting

IBM operated a 460-acre semiconductor research and manufacturing campus in East Fishkill for nearly fifty years. The site, now iPark 84, houses mixed-use commercial and residential facilities and still anchors the local tech economy.

One current iPark tenant wants to expand an existing datacenter by about 150 megawatts, far below Treetop's proposal. Residents say their fight targets scale, not technology.

"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 Tanya Radford, an East Fishkill resident and professor.

Fran Caracappa, a candidate for county legislature, drew the line at Treetop's size. "The pushback is really to the size," Caracappa said. "The Treetop center would be 1,000 megawatts. People do not want to pay higher electricity rates because of a larger datacenter coming in and putting pressure on the grid."

What are residents worried about?

Residents cite five concerns: water, jobs, noise, diesel backup generators, and rural character. Radford lives near the Appalachian Trail and worries about the wooded landscape around the proposed site.

IBM's legacy sharpened those worries. Groundwater contamination from semiconductor manufacturing left several Superfund sites in the area.

Job creation ranks as a separate anxiety. Melissa Hoffmann, an organizer with Food & Water Watch, said the datacenter would "provide very few jobs". Caracappa agreed that construction work would not deliver lasting local employment.

"It's not going to provide work to keep people here like the previous tech businesses did," Caracappa said. "So what's the benefit to the town?"

How is Treetop responding?

Treetop appealed the measure. In a 17-page objection letter reviewed by the Guardian, company attorneys argued the three-year moratorium unlawfully targets Treetop's property and functions as a permanent prohibition rather than a temporary planning tool.

Treetop said it spent years and significant resources on environmental reviews, wetlands investigations, traffic studies, and utility coordination for the site.

Town supervisor Nick D'Alessandro wrote on Facebook in June that no datacenter application has ever reached the planning board. The post was later removed; his office did not respond to press requests.

Where does this fit in the wider fight?

Barely two weeks after East Fishkill's vote, Governor Kathy Hochul signed an executive order imposing a one-year statewide pause on so-called hyperscale datacenters. New York became the first US state to adopt such a ban.

President Donald Trump attacked the move on Truth Social, calling it "a terrible decision" and accusing Hochul of acting for political reasons. He later called towns rejecting datacenters "backwards and poor".

That puts East Fishkill at the front edge of a wider reckoning. Rural communities that once welcomed high-tech employers are now testing whether AI infrastructure delivers enough local benefit to justify its appetite for land, power, and water.

The East Fishkill moratorium expires in July 2029. Treetop's appeal, and the zoning questions it forces the town to answer, will shape what AI infrastructure looks like in the Hudson Valley for the rest of the decade.