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centre operator owned by Blackstone, has terminated its Digital Gateway project in Prince William County, Virginia, and withdrawn the legal filings that were keeping it alive.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.
