Digital Gateway, a planned 2,100 acre complex beside the Manassas National Battlefield, lost a courtroom fight even after winning Prince William County's initial 2023 rezoning approval.
In Prince William County, Virginia, already home to the world's largest concentration of data centers, Blackstone's data-center subsidiary QTS has walked away from the largest proposed data center on the planet, ending a multi-year legal fight against organized local opposition that outlasted the project's own 2023 county approval. The cancellation is best read as a local-governance story rather than a sector pullback. QTS says Virginia remains central to its business.
Digital Gateway was pitched as the biggest project of a buildout that has reshaped the region's economy. The plan called for 2,100 acres of new construction next to the Manassas National Battlefield Park, the preserved ground of two Civil War battles, with full buildout topping 22 million square feet of building space. Co-developed with Compass Datacenters, the campus would have set the upper bound of what a single data-center site could be.
The path to dead began in December 2023, when the Prince William Board of County Supervisors approved the rezoning that cleared the project to move forward. For two and a half years after that, the project stayed alive on paper but kept drawing organized opposition from neighbors. Their concerns clustered around electricity demand at a moment when Northern Virginia's grid is already strained, the water and land footprint of a campus that would rival a small city, and the adjacency to a preserved Civil War battlefield whose surroundings are governed by strict preservation rules. Critics also pointed at the speed of the approval itself, arguing that a project of that scale deserved a slower public airing and a clearer plan for how the host community would share in the returns.
The neighborhood concern became a courtroom argument. A Prince William County judge voided the rezoning, and on March 31, 2026, the Virginia Court of Appeals upheld that ruling. The remaining path was an appeal to the Virginia Supreme Court, and on Thursday QTS said it would not pursue it, effectively ending the project and withdrawing the associated filings.
The scale of what was forfeited, as QTS pitched it, was substantial. The company said the project would have generated "tens of billions of dollars in capital investment," "substantial annual local tax revenue," and "thousands of long-term jobs" in Prince William County, projections that should be read as the developer's own framing, not as third-party verified. A legal analysis by the firm BeanKinney read the case as a warning that any large data-center proposal, especially one whose economics depend on a single rezoning vote in a single county, is now exposed to a multi-year courtroom fight in communities organized against it.
The cancellation does not mean QTS is pulling out of Virginia. The same announcement cited $5 billion of investment in Central Virginia and pointed to ongoing investments in Northern Virginia and the Richmond region. In Henrico County, QTS's White Oak Technology Park campus now hosts 13 data centers in operation, construction, or development, with a separate expansion filing adding three more buildings to a complex where four of the planned 16 structures are already running.
That distinction matters more than the headline. Data centers have become the load-bearing infrastructure of the AI buildout, and Virginia still hosts the densest cluster on Earth. Digital Gateway's failure does not change that calculus; it sharpens it. The lesson of Prince William County is that the bottlenecks on the AI cloud buildout are not only GPUs, transmission interconnect, or capital. They are also land use, courtrooms, and local political permission. Where that permission is granted quickly, campuses rise. Where it is not, even the largest planned project on the planet can be stopped in its tracks, and the capacity that would have come online has to be replaced somewhere else, run up against new limits, or simply never exist.
The next test is whether QTS reroutes the displaced scale into other Virginia counties, and whether similar large proposals elsewhere run into the same organized resistance that killed Digital Gateway. A related signal in the same regulatory wave, a data-center moratorium declared invalid in a separate jurisdiction earlier this year, suggests that the friction around the buildout is now traveling faster than the buildout itself.