Treetop Development Project data center, Hopewell Junction, New York

Treetop Companies, a New Jersey developer, asked New York's grid operator in July 2025 to study a 1,000 megawatt data center on 137 wooded acres it controls in East Fishkill, near Hopewell Junction in Dutchess County, but never filed an application with the town. On June 25, 2026, the East Fishkill Town Board passed a three-year moratorium on data centers, running to July 1, 2029, that has effectively blocked the proposal. Treetop wanted a 1 gigawatt facility, with 500 megawatts of power open by 2028 and the rest by 2030.

That is more than 10 times the size of the largest existing data center in New York. A drawing on Treetop's website showed a 1.16 million square foot data center south of Old State Road, off Donovan Drive. The project would connect to ConEd's grid, though the grid study also looked at its effect on Central Hudson and NYSEG.

Through the landowner, Donovan Drive Holdings LLC, Treetop had first sought approval in 2023 for two warehouses totaling 765,000 square feet on the same industrial-zoned land, a plan later paused when the town adopted a separate industrial moratorium in August 2024. Treetop, known mainly for homes and commercial complexes, did not answer questions about whether it would formally pursue the data center.

Town Supervisor Nick D'Alessandro said the town told the developer there was no power for it. "There's only 50 megawatts of power available for the entire area," he said, adding that a new substation would be needed, "which is at least five years away." "It would draw more energy than currently consumed by all of the buildings in iPark 84," the former IBM East Fishkill complex, he told Mid-Hudson News. By the June vote the proposal no longer appeared in the grid operator's interconnection queue.

Organizers from Food & Water Watch and For The Many rallied outside Town Hall before the vote, chanting "We can't drink data!" "You know what we don't need to survive? A 1,000-megawatt data center. We can't allow it," said Rosemary DaCruz of For The Many. Resident Fran Caracappa said: "East Fishkill is a town basically on well water and we sit on aquifers," and asked how much water would be used and where it would come from.

Resident Tanya Radford said ratepayers should not have to pay for new infrastructure that supports new industry. The town's resolution cites worries about energy costs and says groundwater has already been affected by three superfund sites. A Change.org petition against the plan had 1,440 signatures by late May.

The vote followed a public hearing of nearly two hours and was unanimous, after resident Chris Frolick told the board: "I think it's very blatantly obvious, if there is nothing else you take away from this, we don't want it." The moratorium bars permitting or consideration of any data center "until the completion of federal and state studies" of their power and water use, noise and heat emissions, with an exception for one "ancillary to an existing or permitted use and less than 20MW."

Treetop had not returned repeated requests for comment when WAMC reported the vote on June 26, 2026. Councilmember Marianne Flores said the freeze was not a permanent ban and hoped it would let the town put in place a task force of planning and zoning representatives, utility experts, environmental professionals, engineers, business leaders and residents. Before the hearing, D'Alessandro had written on Facebook that there was no application before the town and had never been one for a data center.