Developers pivot to other sites but face similar hurdles across regions.
Largest Data Center Project Ever Proposed Is Officially Dead
The largest data center project ever proposed in the U.S. is officially dead.
Blackstone-owned QTS Realty Trust withdrew its appeal to the Virginia Supreme Court on July 2, closing out a three-year legal fight over the Prince William Digital Gateway, a planned 2,100-acre campus in Prince William County, Virginia that would have packed 37 buildings and 22 million square feet of data centers next to Manassas National Battlefield Park. At full build-out, the project carried an estimated $100 billion price tag and would have been the largest data center complex in the world.
QTS was the last developer standing. Co-developer Compass Datacenters, backed by Brookfield, dropped its own appeal in April, and the Prince William Board of County Supervisors withdrew from the litigation the same month after spending nearly $2 million in taxpayer funds defending the original rezoning. That approval, granted in 2023, was voided by the Virginia Court of Appeals in March, which found the county’s public notice for the rezoning hearing fell short of the state’s six-day spacing requirement between newspaper notices.