Prince William Digital Gateway data center project officially dies

After a legal battle that lasted more than two years, the controversial Prince William Digital Gateway, a proposed 23 million-square-foot data center complex planned on 2,100 acres near Manassas National Battlefield Park, is officially dead.

The project’s demise came last week when GW Acquisition Co., an affiliate of QTS Data Centers, withdrew its petitions seeking to overturn a March 31 ruling by the Virginia Court of Appeals that invalidated the project’s rezonings.

The Court of Appeals affirmed an August 2025 decision by Prince William Circuit Court Judge Kimberly A. Irving, who ruled in favor of the Oak Valley Homeowners Association, 11 other Gainesville landowners and, in related litigation, the American Battlefield Trust. The plaintiffs sued the Prince William Board of Supervisors and the project’s two developers — GW Acquisition Co. and H&H Capital Acquisitions, an affiliate of Compass Datacenters — challenging the legality of the rezoning approvals.

Oak Valley Homeowners President Mac Haddow said the association was “obviously were very pleased that reality sunk in on the last of the defendants in this action” and called the project’s approval “defective” from the start.

QTS said in its filing it made the decision to terminate the project “after careful consideration.”

“The project advanced through years of planning, analysis, and public review, and was approved by the Prince William Board of County Supervisors following a rigorous process,” the company said in a statement. “As proposed, the project would have delivered significant infrastructure investment to Prince William County, including tens of billions of dollars in capital investment, substantial annual local tax revenues to support public services, and thousands of long-term jobs.”

The company said it would proceed with “a responsible and orderly termination of project activities.”

QTS declined to elaborate on the decision, instead sending a statement that mirrored the language in the court filing. A legal representative for QTS declined to comment.

The lawsuits began after the Board of Supervisors’ December 2023 decision to rezone roughly 1,790 acres for the project following a 29-hour public hearing in which many residents voiced opposition.

Irving voided the rezonings, finding that the county failed to comply with required public notice rules under both state law and its own zoning ordinance. The board was required to advertise the proposed rezonings twice in a newspaper, with the first notice appearing no more than 14 days before the vote and at least six days between publications. The county planned to publish notices on Nov. 28 and Dec. 5, ahead of a Dec. 12, 2023, hearing.

However, the first advertisement never ran after the county failed to confirm the placement with the newspaper, according to the court. Irving found that the error was the county’s responsibility, not the newspaper’s, based on email exchanges and testimony from newspaper staff.

After missing the initial notice, the county proceeded with the hearing anyway, publishing advertisements on Dec. 2, Dec. 5 and Dec. 9. The court found those notices did not meet the legal requirements. The proposed rezoning documents referenced in the advertisements were not made available for public review until Dec. 7, according to court records.

The Court of Appeals affirmed Irving’s ruling on March 31.

On April 14, the Prince William County Board of Supervisors unanimously voted not to appeal the matter to the Virginia Supreme Court. That same month, Compass also declined further appeal.

“Compass has reached the unfortunate conclusion that we cannot move forward with the Prince William Digital Gateway project,” Compass President AJ Byers said in an April 29 statement. “While we still believe this project offered significant benefits for the region and our neighbors, recent legal actions and compounding regulatory hurdles have effectively closed a viable path forward.”

However, QTS filed petitions for appeal on April 30, becoming the sole remaining entity appealing the case before ultimately withdrawing the petitions on July 2.

Prince William County and Compass did not immediately return requests for comment.

Haddow said he believed the data center operators thought the best way to secure approvals for the project was to focus on the county’s Board of Supervisors, which at the time was led by former Chair Ann Wheeler, a lame duck who supported the Prince William Digital Gateway.

He said four years ago, opposition started to build toward the project, but it was relatively small.

Today, he said, the dynamics are different as there is much more awareness about data centers, which have become “a very potent political issue” and not a matter public officials can “dismiss or just push aside and take the money of the data center operators and think that there’s no consequence for that.”

The association, which represents 254 homeowners, raised concerns about the Digital Gateway project resulting in a loss of property values, noise, light and sound pollution and degradation of water supply.

“Bottom line is that I think that the signal and the message that should be delivered to the data center companies is they cannot treat communities as obstacles to overcome, but rather should work with and make sure that the impacts on these communities are derivative of a good plan for the placement of where these data centers ought to occur,” he said. “We’re not against data centers; we just think they ought to be placed in the right positions.”

In a statement, American Battlefield Trust President David Duncan described the July 2 termination of the project as “a banner day for the historic preservation community.”

“Our decision to fight an enormous and inappropriate data center project threatening one of America’s most hallowed historic places has been completely vindicated,” he said. “I am grateful for the stalwart determination of all who stood with us to ensure these deep-pocketed data center developers did not succeed with their plans to construct dozens of data centers next to a beloved national park and historic treasure.”

The trust noted that while a new rezoning for the project could be pursued, “Virginian communities that once embraced data centers have had a change of heart, now that impacts are better understood. The rising groundswell of opposition to these large-scale proposals has garnered local, national and international attention.”

Elena Schlossberg, executive director of The Coalition to Protect Prince William County, said community opposition to the project has been ongoing for years and that the coalition was unwilling to “sacrifice where we live,” and views the spread of data centers in Prince William as a problem that poses unsustainable energy demands and high environmental risks. She said the industry treats neighboring communities terribly. It took “a relentless amount of advocacy,” protest and demand for transparency, she said, to get to last week’s victory.

“Nobody will ever understand the amount of work that that took, and how much blood, sweat and tears went into that fight,” she said.