QTS Blackstone Digital Gateway killed Jul 2 / 2100 acres 37 buildings 22M sqft gigawatt-scale / world's largest planned data center campus / public-notice defect rezoning voided / VA Court of Appeals affirmed Mar 31 / QTS withdrew VA Supreme Court petition / American Battlefield Trust + Oak Valley HOA / Chap Petersen + Craig Blakeley / Prince William County spent 1.7M outside counsel then abandoned Apr 14 / new litigation template for VA opposition groups / Cliff diligence add public-notice compliance field

Plain-English background on what got killed and why it matters. Digital Gateway was the planned largest data center campus in the world by every dimension. Location: 2,100 acres of former farmland immediately east of Manassas National Battlefield Park in Prince William County, Virginia (about 30 miles west of DC, inside Data Center Alley). Scope: 37 individual data center buildings totaling roughly 22 million square feet — for scale, that's about 144 Walmart supercenters of computing floor space in one campus. Power: gigawatt-scale, plausibly 2-3 GW at full buildout, which is why it needed brand-new 500 kV transmission infrastructure built specifically to serve it. Owner: Quality Technology Services (QTS), which Blackstone bought in 2021 for $10 billion. The project has been fought for three years by two organized opposition groups: the American Battlefield Trust (a national nonprofit that protects Civil War battlefields, represented in this litigation by Chap Petersen, who is a former state senator and a well-known Virginia land-use attorney), and the Oak Valley Homeowners Association (eleven neighboring residents, represented by attorney Craig Blakeley). Their legal theory was NOT that data centers are inherently bad, that ratepayers shouldn't subsidize them, or that Prince William County lacked jurisdiction. Their theory was much narrower and much more legally durable: Prince William County's Board of Supervisors approved the December 2023 rezoning without providing legally required public notice to residents within the specific distance mandated by state law and by the county's own ordinance. That theory won at circuit court in August 2025 (Judge Kimberly A. Irving voided the rezonings). The Virginia Court of Appeals unanimously affirmed on March 31, 2026. QTS petitioned the Virginia Supreme Court for review. On July 2, 2026, QTS's affiliated LLCs (GW Acquisition Co., LLC and GW Acquisition Co. I, LLC) formally filed notice withdrawing their Supreme Court petition. QTS's public statement: 'after careful consideration' the company decided to terminate the project and 'proceed with a responsible wind-down.' Why this specific outcome matters far beyond one project. Every data center campus in America that requires local rezoning has to go through a public-notice process — typically requiring the county to publish notice in a local newspaper of general circulation, mail notice to property owners within a specific distance (usually 500-1000 feet, depending on jurisdiction), and hold at least one advertised public hearing before the vote. County boards make procedural mistakes in this process constantly, because notice requirements vary by state, by county, by the specific type of zoning action, and by whether the parcel is over a size threshold that triggers additional notice. Before yesterday, developers treated notice-defect risk as a nuisance — you might get a delay while a court sorted it out, but the underlying rezoning would ultimately hold. QTS/Blackstone just proved that assumption wrong on the biggest planned campus in the world. A Supreme Court withdrawal is not a settlement; it's a concession that the underlying rezoning cannot be salvaged. Public-notice defect is now a project-killing risk, not a delay-risk, if the opposition is organized and well-counseled. Who gains from this precedent. Every organized opposition group in every Virginia county with an in-flight data center rezoning now has a template: hire a Virginia land-use attorney, review the county's notice procedures for the specific zoning action, look for defects, and litigate the rezoning to void. This is a well-defined, low-cost, high-leverage playbook. Notice defects are easy to find and easy to prove; opposition groups don't need to litigate policy or ratepayer economics — they just need to prove the county board didn't dot every i. Prince William County reportedly spent $1.7M on outside legal counsel defending this rezoning before voting April 14, 2026 to abandon the defense. Meaning the county itself walked away before QTS did. The generalizable pattern for the Cliff regulatory corpus. Virginia's public-notice statute is representative of most US states with similar Dillon Rule frameworks — the specifics vary, but the shape is the same: rezonings require statutorily-defined notice, notice defects can void the rezoning, and voided rezonings kill the project even after construction commitments have been made. Any Cliff site-diligence output for Virginia sites should now include an explicit review of the public-notice compliance record of the county board that approved the underlying rezoning — the newer failure mode is not 'is the site technically viable' but 'is there a notice defect an opposition group can weaponize.' The QTS Digital Gateway outcome should be logged as the load-bearing precedent for that failure mode.

Primary source · Washington Times — Company kills plan for world's largest data center hub near Manassas National Battlefield Park (Jul 3 2026) + Bloomberg — Blackstone's QTS Abandons Massive Data Center in Virginia (Jul 2 2026) + Potomac Local — QTS Withdraws Supreme Court Appeal, Ending Proposed Digital Gateway Data Center Project (Jul 3 2026) + FOX 5 DC — QTS drops appeal, ending plans for massive Prince William County data center + Tom's Hardware — Blackstone-owned QTS abandons planned world's largest data center campus after years of lawsuits — 2,100-acre Virginia Digital Gateway project dies over a newspaper-notice technicality + National Parks Conservation Association — Victory for Manassas: Proposed Massive Data Center Digital Gateway Threat Ends + InsideNova — Digital Gateway data center project in Prince William dies ↗