QTS cancels Virginia data center project after years of opposition

Blackstone-backed QTS terminated its planned Digital Gateway data center project in Virginia on July 2 and withdrew the related filings, ending a years-long fight over one of the largest proposed campus builds in the country. The site in Prince William County, near Manassas National Battlefield Park, had been envisioned as a 2,100-acre complex that reporting and advocacy groups said could have included 37 data centers and more than 22 million square feet of buildings.

The cancellation closes a bruising local conflict that moved through county hearings, court challenges and an appeal that never found a path back to approval. On April 15, Prince William County supervisors voted unanimously not to continue defending the project on appeal, after the county had spent about $1.72 million in taxpayer money on the litigation. A month and a half earlier, on March 31, the Virginia Court of Appeals issued a unanimous ruling that invalidated the rezoning because of public-notice failures. Compass Datacenters had already exited the project, leaving QTS as the final holdout before the developer pulled the plug.

The battlefield setting helped turn the proposal into a state-level flashpoint. Manassas National Battlefield Park is a 5,073-acre National Park Service unit that preserves the sites of the First and Second Battles of Manassas and protects the historic landscape and viewsheds around them. That made the prospect of a giant industrial campus especially contentious in a county already wrestling with questions over land use, noise, water demand and the strain of data-center power consumption.

The stakes extended far beyond one parcel of land. Virginia remains the world’s largest data center market, and the Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission has said Northern Virginia accounts for 13% of reported global operational capacity and 25% of capacity in the Americas. The Northern Virginia Technology Council estimated that data centers generated nearly $40 billion in statewide economic impact in 2025, while Virginia’s FY 2025 sales-and-use tax revenue loss from data center exemptions was put at $1.6 billion. Those numbers have sharpened the policy debate over whether the industry’s tax benefits and construction jobs outweigh the infrastructure costs.

QTS said Virginia remains a major part of its business and pointed to existing investments in Northern Virginia and the Richmond region, including $5 billion in Central Virginia. Even as Digital Gateway disappears, the company’s footprint in the state shows the industry is not retreating, only colliding more often with local resistance as AI demand drives a new wave of power-hungry campuses.