Prince William Digital Gateway data center, Prince William County, Virginia

The Prince William Digital Gateway would have been the largest data center campus in the world: 37 buildings across more than 2,100 acres near Gainesville, Virginia, next to Manassas National Battlefield Park. The developers, QTS and Compass Datacenters, said it would bring "tens of billions of dollars" in investment and thousands of long-term jobs. The Prince William Board of County Supervisors, then chaired by Ann Wheeler, approved the rezoning of roughly 1,790 acres in December 2023. The vote came after a public hearing that ran 29 hours.

The Oak Valley Homeowners Association and the American Battlefield Trust sued, arguing that the county's hearing notices in The Washington Post did not meet state and county requirements. On August 7, 2025, Circuit Court Judge Kimberly Irving agreed and declared the rezoning void "ab initio," meaning it had never legally existed. The county went on to spend $1.72 million defending the rezoning in court.

Deshundra Jefferson became board chair in January 2024 opposing the project, a reversal from Wheeler's support. On March 31, 2026, a three-judge panel of the Virginia Court of Appeals, consolidating the Oak Valley and Battlefield Trust cases, unanimously upheld Irving's ruling, finding the public notice requirement could not be waived even for people who had actually attended the hearing. The Coalition to Protect Prince William County said the decision proved "Our community never gave up and never gave in." Mac Haddow, president of the Oak Valley Homeowners Association, said developers "cannot treat communities as obstacles to overcome" and needed to design projects so a neighborhood's impacts are addressed as part of the plan.

On April 15, 2026, the county's Board of Supervisors voted unanimously to drop its own appeal of the ruling. Compass Datacenters declined further appeal the same month, its president AJ Byers saying on April 29 that "Compass has reached the unfortunate conclusion that we cannot move forward with the Prince William Digital Gateway project." QTS, the last developer still fighting in court, withdrew its final appeal to the Virginia Supreme Court on July 2, 2026, ending the project. QTS's legal team wrote in its withdrawal notice: "… after careful consideration, QTS has made the decision to terminate the Digital Gateway project and withdraw its associated filings." The Coalition to Protect Prince William County called the outcome proof that "the rule of law and the common man have prevailed."

Support in Virginia fell while the case played out: just 35 percent of voters now say they would be comfortable with a new data center in their community, down from 69 percent in 2023, according to a Washington Post-Schar School poll reported by Tom's Hardware.