Treetop’s 1-gigawatt campus would have drawn more power than all of Buffalo
The East Fishkill moratorium grew out of an early-2026 disclosure that Treetop Companies, a real estate developer, was exploring plans for what could have become one of the largest AI datacenters in the country. The proposed campus — roughly 1 gigawatt of capacity, spanning more than 1 million square feet across about 143 acres — drew public attention through a separate application to the New York Independent System Operator, the independent organization that manages New York’s high-voltage power grid, rather than through any local filing. Treetop, through a local property owner called Donovan Drive Holdings, had entered NYISO’s interconnection queue seeking approval for a project that would use approximately 1,000 megawatts of electrical service. That request was more consistent with a large-scale AI datacenter than with the warehouse development the company had initially pursued.
East Fishkill is a hamlet of about 30,000 residents located 70 miles north of New York City, and existing zoning laws did not allow for the construction of large datacenters. Even so, residents organized in opposition before the developer filed any permit application with the municipal government, attending town board meetings, holding rallies and advocating for a pause.
“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.
Town officials repeatedly stressed that no formal application had been filed.
“There is no application before the Town. There has never been an application for a datacenter,” East Fishkill supervisor Nick D’Alessandro wrote on Facebook in June. D’Alessandro later took down the post. His office did not respond to the Guardian’s request for comment.
The town board nonetheless adopted the moratorium unanimously in late June, extending what officials had initially discussed as a seven-month pause into a three-year prohibition on new datacenters larger than 20 megawatts. The measure gives officials time to study potential impacts on water resources and local ecosystems.
Melissa Hoffmann, an East Fishkill resident and organizer with a local chapter of Food & Water Watch, an environmental advocacy nonprofit, said months of public pressure ultimately convinced the board to lengthen the pause. “Residents have been speaking out against it to stop any application from coming into the town for the datacenter,” Hoffmann said.
East Fishkill spent decades as one of the nation’s leading semiconductor manufacturing centers. International Business Machines Corporation, better known as IBM, transformed the town during the latter half of the 20th century, employing thousands of workers at a 460-acre campus that laid the foundation for what is now iPark 84, a mixed-use commercial and residential site. Former IBM facilities remain a defining part of the local economy, and one current iPark tenant is seeking to expand an existing datacenter by approximately 150 megawatts. Groundwater contamination associated with IBM-era semiconductor production left lasting scars, and several polluted Superfund sites remain in the area.
“This is not an anti-tech town,” Radford said. “I’m an educator. I use technology.”
Fran Caracappa, a resident and a candidate for county legislature, focused on the electricity question. “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.”
Residents also questioned the economic case. Hoffmann said she was concerned that the data center would “provide very few jobs.” Caracappa said temporary construction jobs were unlikely to lead to 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?”
Additional concerns cited by residents included noise, diesel backup generators, property values, wetlands and the area’s rural character. Radford, whose home sits near the Appalachian Trail, said the landscape around the proposed site was part of why she moved to the area. “My neighbors and I agree that additional development in the area could only negatively impact the quality of life here,” she said.
In the appeal letter, attorneys for Treetop argued the three-year moratorium unlawfully targets the company’s property and effectively amounts to a permanent prohibition rather than a “legitimate temporary planning measure.” The company said it had spent years and significant resources advancing development plans for the site, including environmental reviews, wetlands investigations, traffic studies, and utility coordination. Town officials have maintained that no datacenter application has ever been submitted and that the moratorium provides time to evaluate whether existing zoning properly addresses an entirely new class of industrial development.
Barely two weeks after the East Fishkill moratorium passed, Governor Hochul signed an executive order mandating a one-year statewide pause on so-called hyperscale datacenters, making New York the first US state to enact such a moratorium. President Donald Trump responded on his Truth Social platform, calling the move “a terrible decision” and accusing Hochul of implementing the ban for purely political reasons. “One of the biggest Driving Forces in the Future for Jobs, are Data Centers. They are big, strong, bold, and Money Machines for the State in which they are built,” Trump wrote. Later in the summer, he called towns rejecting datacenters “backwards and poor.”
Hoffmann framed the East Fishkill outcome as part of a broader pattern. “People are winning,” Hoffmann said. “Communities that fight these datacenters are winning.”