Compass and QTS Walk Away From Prince William's $100B Digital Gateway
Brookfield-backed Compass pulled out in April, Blackstone's QTS dropped its final appeal in July, closing out the country's largest data center siting failure.
Compass Datacenters and QTS have officially abandoned the PW Digital Gateway, a proposed $100 billion data center corridor in Prince William County, Virginia, that would have been the largest in the world. Brookfield-backed Compass withdrew its portion in April 2026; Blackstone-owned QTS, the last developer still fighting in court, dropped its Supreme Court appeal on July 2, ending the project for good.
Why it matters
This was not a small-town pilot project killed by NIMBY sentiment. It was a $100 billion, 3.5-gigawatt campus, backed by two of the largest alternative asset managers in the world, in the country’s most established data center market. It still died. The lesson for developers is that siting risk now sits alongside power risk as a real constraint on megaprojects, not a rounding error to be handled with a community-benefits line item late in the process. A rezoning that clears the board on a procedural technicality, rather than durable local consent, is a rezoning that can still be unwound years later.
The numbers
The Digital Gateway would have covered roughly 2,100 acres near Gainesville with up to 37 buildings and 3.5 gigawatts of power demand, about what Tampa uses. Land assembled for the project ran as high as $1 million an acre. Prince William County spent $1.72 million in taxpayer funds defending the original approval before its own Board of Supervisors voted to withdraw from that defense in April 2026. The underlying legal failure was procedural: a judge voided the December 2023 rezoning in August 2024 over improper newspaper notice ahead of the marathon 27-hour hearing, not over the merits of the plan itself.
What’s next
Expect site selectors to treat legally bulletproof public notice and early, durable buy-in from adjacent homeowners associations as a gating item before land assembly, not after. Prince William’s own board separately rejected a second, 1,940-acre data center rezoning this summer, so operators chasing power-rich Virginia sites should assume the county’s political tolerance for new campuses has shifted, not just this one project’s paperwork. Track how other jurisdictions respond at our national data centers hub.