QTS, the data centre operator owned by Blackstone, has terminated its Digital Gateway project in Prince William County, Virginia, and withdrawn the legal filings that were keeping it alive. The move, confirmed on Thursday, ends a fight that had already outlasted most of the other parties involved in it.
The project was approved in December 2023 to become one of the largest data centre campuses in the world, spanning roughly 2,000 acres near Gainesville and Manassas, adjacent to Manassas National Battlefield Park.
At full build-out it would have delivered more than 22 million square feet of data centre space, dwarfing most existing campuses and adding to a wave of development that has made Virginia the densest data centre market on the planet.
Getting there took a 27-hour public hearing and a bitterly split vote. The Prince William Board of County Supervisors approved the rezoning on a narrow margin after that marathon session in December 2023, and the approval was challenged almost immediately by two separate plaintiffs, the Oak Valley Homeowners Association and the American Battlefield Trust, both of which argued the county had failed to give proper public notice before the vote.
They won. A Prince William County Circuit Court judge ruled last August that the rezoning approvals were void because of that notice failure, and the Virginia Court of Appeals unanimously upheld the ruling in March.
Prince William County itself and co-developer Compass dropped out of the litigation earlier this year rather than keep fighting, leaving QTS as the sole party still pursuing an appeal, this time to the Virginia Supreme Court. Thursday’s withdrawal ends that final avenue.
QTS framed the loss in terms of what the region will not get. The project, it said in a statement, would have delivered tens of billions of dollars in capital investment, substantial annual local tax revenue and thousands of long-term jobs.
The company added that Virginia remains central to its business regardless, pointing to roughly $5 billion already invested in the Richmond area as evidence it is not walking away from the state altogether.
None of the parties who spent four years fighting over Digital Gateway got what they originally wanted. The county lost a marquee project it had approved after an all-night hearing.
The opposition groups won, but only after a judge and then an appeals panel intervened to undo a vote the supervisors had already cast.
The termination lands squarely inside a broader backlash against data centre growth that has spread across the United States as AI and cloud demand drive an unprecedented building boom.
Communities near proposed sites have increasingly organised against projects over concerns about electricity and water consumption, noise and land use, a trend detailed in our coverage of the roughly 75 data centre projects blocked or delayed nationally in the first quarter of this year alone.
Digital Gateway, given its scale and its location beside a Civil War battlefield, had become one of the most closely watched fights in that movement.
Blackstone’s broader data centre ambitions remain very much intact elsewhere. The firm has been building out AI infrastructure investments well beyond QTS, including a planned data centre real estate investment trust and a large stake in a cloud computing joint venture with Google built around Google’s custom chips.
The Digital Gateway collapse is a loss for one specific project rather than a retreat from the sector.
What happens to the roughly 2,000 acres of rezoned land now is unclear. More than a hundred landowners who had entered into agreements tied to the development had already spent months in limbo while the litigation dragged on, and Thursday’s withdrawal formally closes off the path that would have converted their land into part of the campus.
Prince William County, for its part, gets to decide what if anything comes next for a site that spent four years as the country’s most contested patch of rural Virginia.
