A data center outfit owned by the leveraged buyout firm Blackstone Group has dropped its appeal of a state court ruling blocking its plans to build a digital gateway adjacent to Manassas National Battlefield Park.
The move brings to an end the years-long fight to halt a proposed 2,100-acre data center complex adjacent to Manassas National Battlefield Park in Prince William County.
“This is a banner day for the historic preservation community. Our decision to fight an enormous and inappropriate data center project threatening one of America’s most hallowed historic places has been completely vindicated,” said David Duncan, the president of the American Battlefield Trust, which had joined the Oak Valley Homeowners Association and in lawsuits against Prince William County and the two data center developers, Compass and QTS, challenging a Board of Supervisors vote to make way for what would have been the largest data center complex in the world.
QTS – the initials stand for Quality Technology Services – was founded in 2003; in 2021, it was purchased by Blackstone Group, whose co-founder and CEO, Stephen Schwarzman, is a political ally of Donald Trump and MAGA megadonor.
You don’t pay tens of millions in political donations to not get your way, and for the longest time, QTS was getting its way on its planned Prince William Digital Gateway – the plans for which feature 37 data center buildings, the equivalent of 144 Walmart Supercenters; the cluster of buildings would require 14 on-site electrical substations for operation, projected to consume 9 gigawatts of electricity, enough to power more than 2 million homes.
The Prince William County Board of Supervisors voted 4-3 in 2023 to rezone the property targeted for the development, in the waning days of the political tenures of two pro-data center supervisors whose terms were about to expire.
A Prince William Circuit Court judge ruled that the rezoning vote should be voided due to improper public notice ahead of the 2023 Board of Supervisors meeting; the Virginia Court of Appeals affirmed the lower-court ruling earlier this year, on March 31.
The appeals-court ruling gave the defendants in the case – QTS, fellow developer Compass Datacenters and the county – an April 30 deadline to appeal.
The county, through a unanimous Board of Supervisors vote on April 14, withdrew from the suit; Compass dropped out of the proceedings on April 28.
But QTS filed an appeal on the deadline day, April 30, and was proceeding with the suit until withdrawing from the case on Thursday.
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Chris Graham
