Holtec Decommissioning International Data Center, Buchanan, New York

Indian Point stopped making electricity in 2021, and Holtec wants to sell 200 megawatts of it to a data center instead. The company, which took ownership of the site at Buchanan, in Westchester County, in May 2021 to decommission it, told the Indian Point Decommissioning Oversight Board on December 5, 2024 that it had asked the New York Independent System Operator that October for 200 megawatts of grid power. The plan is for the 240 acre site, and specifically the training building area, to anchor an initiative Holtec calls HI-CLOUD: a million square foot, 200 megawatt utility-ready data center.

There is no customer. Holtec vice president Frank Spagnuolo told the board: "Currently we have no offer. We're not working with any outside Amazon, Microsoft, nobody, for a data center or anything."

The board had other things on its mind. Richard Webster of Riverkeeper raised caesium-137, found in July in one surface soil sample near the training building: "It's never good when you find radioactive materials that you don't expect to be there." Spagnuolo said the area "was not identified as an area of concern. We did not expect to see any cesium or any radioactive components there at all." The environmental lawyer Susan Shapiro framed it as a choice: "AI has no interest in human life, so we have to choose, are we going to support AI that really has no use for us as human beings and life and the health things that we need to live like clean water and clean air."

New York State's moratorium, running from June 4, 2026 to June 4, 2027, covers data centers of 50 megawatts and above, and East Fishkill has a three year moratorium from June 25, 2026.