QTS Realty Trust filed an appeal Apr 30 (hours before the deadline) to the Virginia Supreme Court asking it to overturn the Court of Appeals ruling that nullified Prince William County's 2023 zoning amendments authorizing the 22M sqft Digital Gateway corridor. Petition argues the Court of Appeals committed errors of law in invalidating three County zoning amendments. The other co-developer, Compass Datacenters, withdrew from the project earlier; PWC said it would not put further money into appeals. Reported as the largest planned data center corridor in the country.
Primary source · Washington Post ↗
Why it matters
Add to the open-investigations queue with a watch on the Supreme Court's discretionary review decision (months out, typically). The legal theory is the leading edge of the local-zoning vs state-policy fight — a state-level Supreme Court reinstatement would reset the playbook for hostile-county hyperscaler sites; refusal would harden the precedent that local zoning challenges can nullify approved data center campuses even years post-approval. This is exactly the site readiness-risk surface the regulatory-knowledge-graph + approval-outcomes corpus is positioned to track. The fact that one of two co-developers (Compass) already walked is itself underwriting-relevant: it confirms 'litigation overhang' is now a real input to data center site valuation, not just zoning approval. Useful counterweight to the Dominion 51 GW contracted figure — load is contracted but the underlying buildable site supply is being eroded by exactly this kind of ruling. The two numbers together tell the supply-demand story better than either does alone.
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