East Fishkill Freezes Gigawatt-Scale Data Center With Three-Year Moratorium
East Fishkill, New York, barred consideration of new data centers larger than 20 megawatts until July 2029 under a three-year moratorium adopted unanimously in late June.
The town sits 70 miles north of New York City and has about 30,000 residents. It hosted IBM semiconductor research and manufacturing at a 460-acre campus for nearly 50 years, a history that continues to shape local land use debates The Guardian.
In early 2026, Treetop Companies was exploring plans for an AI data center in the town. The proposal was described as a roughly 1-gigawatt campus spanning more than 1 million square feet across about 143 acres. The vote was unanimous. Existing zoning did not allow construction of large data centers.
The corporate footprint emerged in two tracks. Treetop Development initially pursued approvals for a warehouse development after purchasing property in East Fishkill. Separately, Donovan Drive Holdings entered the interconnection queue of the New York Independent System Operator, or NYISO, for a project in East Fishkill using approximately 1,000 megawatts of electrical service. That request was submitted to NYISO, not to the town.
The scale is electrical before it is physical. The proposed facility would consume more electricity than the entire city of Buffalo, which has about 275,000 people. East Fishkill has about 30,000.
Procedurally, the town and the grid operator were on different timelines. As of May 2026, East Fishkill official D'Alessandro said there was no application for a data center in East Fishkill Mid Hudson News. No application had been filed. The following month, the town board adopted the moratorium. Officials said the pause would allow study of potential impacts on water resources and local ecosystems. The measure lasts until July 1, 2029 Highlands Current.
Local review authority rests in part with the East Fishkill Planning Board, which is appointed by the Town Board and is responsible for reviewing and approving subdivisions and site plans and issuing special permits. The moratorium removes larger data centers from that review pipeline for the duration.
The IBM legacy remains embedded in the site. IBM's Building 323 in East Fishkill received the 2005 Top Fab Award from Semiconductor International magazine. The company had earlier announced plans to invest $700 million to build an advanced microchip development facility at its East Fishkill site.
The broader context here is jurisdictional as much as technical. An interconnection request signals load intent to the bulk power system, while land use authority stays with the municipality. That split explains how a 1,000-megawatt queue position can exist alongside a town record showing no formal site application. It also explains why the moratorium targets consideration thresholds, 20 megawatts, rather than construction itself.
Looking at what this means for siting, East Fishkill offers a compact case study in sequencing. A former industrial parcel, a warehouse approval path, a gigawatt-scale power request, and a zoning code that did not contemplate hyperscale load arrived in quick succession. The town responded by freezing the clock to assess water and ecological constraints. For developers and grid planners, the lesson is that queue access does not substitute for local entitlement, and that communities measuring demand against a neighboring city of 275,000 will weigh megawatts as a governance question, not only an engineering one.
