A New York town that spent decades at the centre of American semiconductor manufacturing has imposed a three-year ban on large datacenters, after residents mobilised against a proposal that could have become one of the largest artificial intelligence facilities in the United States.
East Fishkill’s town board voted unanimously in late June to bar consideration of new datacenters larger than 20 megawatts until July 2029, according to the Guardian. The measure allows officials to study the effect of such facilities on water resources and local ecosystems. The developer at the centre of the dispute has appealed.
The proposal, from real estate firm Treetop Companies, was described as a roughly 1-gigawatt campus spanning more than 1m sq ft across about 143 acres, the Guardian reported. The town sits 70 miles north of New York City and was home for nearly 50 years to a 460-acre IBM campus where the company researched and built semiconductor chips.
Opposition began before any application
News of the possible project emerged in early 2026, and residents responded quickly — attending town board meetings, organising rallies and calling for a temporary ban — before a single permit application had been filed with the municipal government, per the Guardian.
East Fishkill’s existing zoning rules already did not permit large datacenters. The paper reported that the town went ahead with a moratorium regardless, which it described as a sign of the depth of local anger.
Resident and professor Tanya Radford told the Guardian that the pace of change demanded caution. She said the community needed to think through how datacenters and new energy demand would affect long-term cohesion, environmental quality and the town’s character.
Radford added that the opposition should not be read as hostility to technology. “This is not an anti-tech town,” she said. “I’m an educator. I use technology.”
How the project surfaced
According to the Guardian, Treetop Development bought property in the town and initially sought approvals for a warehouse. Residents later learned that the company, through local property owner Donovan Drive Holdings, had joined a queue for a project requiring roughly 1,000 megawatts of electrical service — a load the paper said is more consistent with a large-scale AI datacenter than a warehouse.
The request was not filed with East Fishkill. It went to the interconnection queue of the New York Independent System Operator, the independent body that manages the state’s high-voltage grid and which any large project must ask for permission to connect to, the Guardian reported.
The filing raised immediate concerns locally. The proposed facility would use more electricity than the whole city of Buffalo, which has about 275,000 residents, while East Fishkill is home to roughly 30,000 people.
Melissa Hoffmann, a resident and organiser with a local chapter of the environmental advocacy non-profit Food & Water Watch, told the Guardian that residents had been speaking out to prevent any application reaching the town.
Officials said no application existed
Because nothing had been formally submitted to East Fishkill, town officials repeatedly said there was nothing before the planning board to review or reject. Supervisor Nick D’Alessandro wrote on Facebook in June that there was no application before the town and never had been one for a datacenter, the Guardian reported. The post was later removed, and his office did not respond to the paper’s request for comment.
D’Alessandro stressed that standalone datacenters were not even listed as a permissible use under local zoning, yet the board still banned their construction for three years, saying the pause would give the community certainty and time for further study.
Hoffmann told the Guardian that months of public pressure persuaded the board to extend what had initially been discussed as a seven-month pause into a three-year moratorium.
A town with a tech history
East Fishkill has frequently been described as an innovation hub, which the Guardian noted makes the opposition notable: the town has not historically been unwelcoming to new technology.
International Business Machines Corporation turned the area into one of the country’s leading semiconductor manufacturing centres during the second half of the 20th century, employing thousands and laying the groundwork for what is now iPark 84, a mixed-use commercial and residential site. Former IBM facilities remain central to the local economy, and iPark still houses technology companies. One tenant is seeking to expand an existing datacenter by about 150 megawatts — far below the Treetop proposal.
Residents told the Guardian their objection is aimed at scale rather than technology itself. Fran Caracappa, a resident and candidate for county legislature, said the pushback was about size. He said the Treetop centre would be 1,000 megawatts and that people did not want higher electricity rates caused by a larger datacenter placing pressure on the grid.
Residents also questioned whether the promised economic benefits would materialise. Hoffmann said she worried the facility would provide very few jobs. Caracappa said he doubted temporary construction work would lead to lasting local employment, asking what benefit the town would receive.
Contamination and environmental concerns
Local scepticism is also shaped by past experience, the Guardian reported. IBM’s manufacturing helped define the region’s tech-industrial identity, but groundwater contamination linked to semiconductor production left lasting damage, and several polluted Superfund sites remain in the area.
Beyond groundwater protection, residents raised concerns about noise, diesel backup generators, property values, wetlands and the area’s rural character.
Radford, who lives near the Appalachian Trail, told the Guardian that the calm, wooded landscape around the proposed site was one reason she moved there. She said she and her neighbours agreed that further development in the area could only harm the quality of life.
Statewide pause draws reaction
About two weeks after the East Fishkill moratorium passed, New York became the first US state to impose a moratorium on new datacenters when Governor Kathy Hochul signed an executive order requiring a one-year statewide pause on hyperscale facilities, the Guardian reported.
President Donald Trump, described by the paper as an ally of tech billionaires and AI investors, criticised the move on Truth Social, calling it a terrible decision and accusing Hochul of acting for political reasons. He wrote that datacenters were among the biggest drivers of future jobs and described them as money machines for the states that host them, and later in the summer called towns rejecting datacenters backwards and poor.
Treetop also objected to East Fishkill’s ban. In a 17-page letter to the town board reviewed by the Guardian, attorneys for the company argued the three-year moratorium unlawfully singled out its property and amounted in effect to a permanent prohibition rather than a legitimate temporary planning measure. The company said it had spent years and substantial resources on development plans for the site, including environmental reviews, wetlands investigations, traffic studies and utility coordination.
Town officials maintained that no datacenter application had ever been submitted and that the moratorium buys time to assess whether existing zoning properly covers an entirely new class of industrial development.
Hoffmann told the Guardian that communities resisting such projects are succeeding. “People are winning,” she said. “Communities that fight these datacenters are winning.”
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