Prince William Data Center Fight: How the Digital Gateway Became the Largest Project to Collapse in Court

In December 2023, the Prince William County Board of County Supervisors sat through more than a full day of public comment before voting, just after dawn, to approve what backers called the largest data center corridor in the world. Less than three years later, in July 2026, that project was dead. It was not stopped by a protest or a ballot measure. It was undone in court, over the fine print of a public notice.

This is the story of the Prince William data center fight, and of the PW Digital Gateway, the project at its center. It is one of the most heavily documented battles over a data center in the United States, and it ended in a way almost no one predicted at the start.

What a data center is, and why towns fight them

A data center is a large windowless building, or a cluster of them, packed with computer servers that store files, run websites, and increasingly train and operate artificial intelligence. They run around the clock, so they draw enormous amounts of electricity, and many use large volumes of water to keep the equipment cool. Towns fight them over three things above all: the strain on the local power grid, the water they use, and what a wall of industrial buildings does to nearby land, roads, and quiet.

What the Digital Gateway would have been

The PW Digital Gateway was a plan to build data centers along Pageland Lane in western Prince William County, next to Manassas National Battlefield Park, the site of the Civil War battles of Bull Run. The land sits near Gainesville, in what the county had long designated as a rural area.

The plan called for roughly 2,100 acres, with about 1,790 of those acres rezoned for the project. Rezoning is the legal step where a local government changes what a piece of land is allowed to be used for, in this case from rural and residential to data center use. Two developers were behind it: QTS Data Centers and Compass Datacenters. Public filings and reporting described a buildout of as many as 37 data center buildings and around 23 million square feet, constructed over roughly two decades.

Supporters and opponents both described it, in the county's own hearings, as potentially the largest data center campus in the world.

The 2023 vote, and who was against it

The approval came after a marathon hearing that stretched across multiple days and more than 27 hours of public comment, ending in the early hours of December 13, 2023. The board voted 4 to 3 to approve the rezonings, with the three Republican members opposed and one Democratic supervisor abstaining. Notably, the county's own professional planning staff had recommended that the rezonings be denied.

The objections came from several directions, each documented in the public record:

• Proximity to the battlefield. The American Battlefield Trust, a national preservation group, campaigned against the project on the grounds that it sat next to Manassas National Battlefield Park.
• Power and infrastructure. The American Battlefield Trust also argued the campus would require extensive electrical infrastructure and high-voltage transmission lines. In its own materials the group estimated the full buildout at up to 9 gigawatts of electricity and 14 on-site substations. Those figures come from an opponent of the project, not from a neutral engineering study, and should be read as the group's estimate. A gigawatt is a large unit of electric power; one gigawatt is roughly enough to supply hundreds of thousands of homes. A substation is the equipment that steps very high voltage power down to a level a facility can use.
• Water, noise, light, and property values. The Oak Valley Homeowners Association, representing residents near the site, raised concerns about noise, light pollution, falling property values, and what it called degradation of the water supply.
• Rural character. Residents and staff both objected that the project broke with the county's long-standing plan to keep its western end rural.

The developers and the supervisors who backed the project pointed to tax revenue as the county's benefit. This post reports their public position and does not characterize their private reasoning.

How the project actually fell: a notice problem

What ultimately ended the Digital Gateway was not the power lines or the battlefield. It was a procedural rule about how the county told the public a vote was coming.

The Oak Valley Homeowners Association and a group of individual homeowners sued, arguing the county had not properly advertised the 2023 hearings the way state and local law require. On August 7, 2025, Prince William County Circuit Court Judge Kimberly A. Irving agreed and ruled the rezonings void. She found the defects in the public notices were, in her words, caused by the county rather than by the newspaper that ran them, and that the county had failed to make the full plans available to the public as the notices said it would. The judge also found that the homeowners had legal standing to sue because they lived close to the site and so were "situated differently from the public as a whole."

The county and the developers appealed. On March 31, 2026, the Virginia Court of Appeals upheld Judge Irving's decision. On April 14, 2026, the Board of Supervisors voted unanimously not to take the case to the Virginia Supreme Court, ending the county's own defense.

The developers stepped back next. Compass President AJ Byers said on April 29, 2026 that "recent legal actions and compounding regulatory hurdles have effectively closed a viable path forward." On July 2, 2026, QTS said that "after careful consideration, QTS has made the decision to terminate the Digital Gateway project and withdraw its associated filings." With that withdrawal, the project was over.

A second large project rejected days later

The Digital Gateway was not the only large data center proposal in western Prince William County. On July 7, 2026, days after the Gateway collapsed, the Board of Supervisors voted unanimously to deny a plan amendment for a separate project variously called Dulles Cloud South or the Dulles South Innovation Center, proposed on close to 2,000 acres in the Gainesville area. County staff had recommended against it, citing infrastructure capacity, environmental impact, traffic, and a poor fit with the area's agricultural designation. A comprehensive plan amendment is a change to the county's long-range blueprint for how land should be used; without it, the project could not move forward.

Both decisions signaled a harder line on very large data centers in the county's rural western end than the 2023 vote had.

Why Prince William, and why data centers cluster in Northern Virginia

Prince William sits at the edge of the largest concentration of data centers in the world, in and around Loudoun County, Virginia, an area the industry calls Data Center Alley. Data centers cluster where three things line up: fiber-optic cables already in the ground, cheap and available electricity, and land near the networks that carry internet traffic. Northern Virginia has all three, which is why the pressure to build spreads outward from Loudoun into neighboring counties like Prince William.

Some of the largest of these projects are described in the industry as hyperscale, meaning campuses built for the biggest cloud and AI operators, at a scale far beyond a single company's back-office server room. The Digital Gateway, at up to 23 million square feet, would have been hyperscale by any measure.

The bottom line

The Prince William data center fight did not turn on a dramatic vote or a single hearing. A major, world-scale project cleared the elected board and still collapsed, because a court found the county had not followed its own notice rules, and because the developers then chose to walk away. For residents typing their county's name into a search box, the practical takeaway is narrow but real: in Prince William, the largest proposals on the rural western side are, as of September 2026, not moving forward, and the process that stopped the biggest one was a lawsuit about procedure, not a referendum.