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.
The fight unfolding in East Fishkill is a single piece of a growing divide. Both rural towns and communities that once eagerly welcomed hi-tech development are increasingly questioning whether AI infrastructure adds enough local benefit to justify its enormous appetite for electricity, water and land. I use technology.” The saga began after Treetop Development purchased property in East Fishkill, initially pursuing approvals for a warehouse development.
Residents later discovered that the company, through local property owner Donovan Drive Holdings, had entered the queue to have a project approved that would use approximately 1,000 megawatts of electrical service, an amount more consistent with a large-scale AI datacenter than a warehouse. This request for approval was not submitted to the town of East Fishkill. Rather, it was submitted to New York Independent System Operator (NYISO)’s interconnection queue.
NYISO is an independent organization responsible for managing New York’s high-voltage power grid, meaning whenever a company wants to build a big new project, it must formally ask NYISO for permission to connect to the grid. For those that call East Fishkill home, the NYISO filing quickly raised concerns. The proposed datacenter would consume more electricity than the entire city of Buffalo, which has about 275,000 people.
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