Virginia's 'Digital Gateway' megaproject halted after community opposition and legal challenge

The Virginia Court of Appeals unanimously halted the “Digital Gateway” project, a planned campus of 37 data centres and 14 substations across roughly 22 million square feet of Prince William County land bordering Manassas National Battlefield Park, ruling that Prince William County’s Board of Supervisors had failed to properly notify the public before the marathon December 2023 hearing at which it approved the rezoning. The court declared the three rezoning decisions “void from the outset.”

The original approval had followed a 27-hour public hearing that drew roughly 400 residents, many opposed, and the site’s proximity to a Civil War battlefield made it a focal point for opposition to Virginia’s data-centre buildout — the state hosts the largest concentration of data centres in the world, much of it in Northern Virginia’s “Data Center Alley.” Residents and preservation groups, including the Piedmont Environmental Council, challenged the rezoning in court on procedural grounds rather than contesting the merits of the project directly.

The ruling does not permanently kill the project: because the underlying rezoning was voided rather than the project rejected on its merits, the land reverts to its prior zoning and developers would have to restart the county approval process from scratch, unless they instead appeal the ruling to the Virginia Supreme Court. Even so, campaigners and local reporting treated it as one of the more concrete wins to date for community opposition to AI-driven data-centre expansion, in a period when most such fights over siting, power demand and land use had ended in approval rather than reversal.