Community Opposition Forces Developers to Abandon $100 Billion Data Center Campus
Brookfield-backed Compass Datacenters and Blackstone’s QTS pulled out of a planned $100 billion data center campus in Prince William County, Virginia, after five years of organized resident opposition. Compass withdrew in April from developing over 800 acres, followed by QTS in July. The Digital Gateway project would have spanned roughly twice the size of Central Park, with up to 37 buildings and 3.5 gigawatts of power demand equivalent to Tampa’s electricity needs. Developers had acquired more than 1,600 acres from landowners who expected to cash in on prices reaching up to $1 million per acre, with another 1,900 acres assembled by neighbors hoping to follow suit.
Residents from the Oak Valley Homeowners Association and Heritage Hunt retirement community filed two lawsuits centered on improper newspaper advertising of a 27-hour zoning hearing. Virginia courts ruled the hearing void due to a clerical error in spacing public notices. Organized opposition groups including the Sierra Club, National Parks Conservation Association, and Coalition to Protect Prince William County staged pressure campaigns that influenced county elections and hardened officials against the project. Compass ultimately chose to exit rather than force nearly 100 landowner families through years of additional legal uncertainty, absorbing tens of millions in sunk costs plus tax liabilities for sellers.
Opposition to data centers has expanded nationally, with developers facing disruptions at 75 sites in the first quarter alone and polls showing seven in ten Americans oppose living near the facilities. New York imposed a moratorium on new data centers while Texas enacted effective development freezes. President Trump called on communities to “let Data Reign” amid the backlash. Blackstone executives who had backed QTS’s land-banking spree grew concerned about throwing good money after bad, while QTS recognized it should have built stronger community ties before locking landowners into confidentiality agreements and sale contracts.
The Digital Gateway collapse created a tested playbook for activists and represents the movement’s largest casualty to date. What began as grassroots organizing is now influencing midterm elections in multiple states, including a crucial Ohio Senate race framed as a referendum on data centers. Glenn Davis, former Virginia Department of Energy head who now advises developers, said the industry never anticipated the scale of opposition and allowed opponents to control the narrative. Compass CEO Chris Crosby said the company’s decision was not purely financial, noting that the essential community partnership had suffered irreversible harm. Prince William County spent $1.7 million in taxpayer funds defending the project in court before withdrawing from the litigation.
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