The Prince William Digital Gateway Lawsuit: How a Notice Defect Voided the World's Biggest Data Center Project

The PW Digital Gateway proposed more than 22 million square feet of data center development across roughly 2,000 acres along Pageland Lane near Gainesville, on land bordering the Manassas battlefield. In December 2023, the Prince William Board of County Supervisors approved rezonings for two developers, QTS and Compass Datacenters, clearing the way for construction.

Opposition had been building for years. The site sits beside one of the most storied Civil War landscapes in the country, and residents of nearby neighborhoods like Oak Valley faced the prospect of living next to an industrial corridor of a scale no American community had ever absorbed. Northern Virginia is already the largest data center market in the world, with neighboring Loudoun County known as Data Center Alley, so the fight was never about whether the region would host data centers. It was about whether a project of this magnitude could be pushed through next to a battlefield and established neighborhoods, and whether the process that approved it followed the law.

In January 2024, the American Battlefield Trust, Oak Valley residents, and allied groups filed suit against Prince William County challenging the December 2023 approvals. The coalition itself was notable: a national preservation organization with resources and staying power, joined by the neighbors who would live with the project, the same pairing of institutional and individual plaintiffs that has anchored durable data center challenges elsewhere.

The challengers' winning argument was procedural. Virginia law spells out how the public must be notified before a rezoning hearing, and the plaintiffs argued the notice for the December 2023 hearing did not meet those requirements. In August 2025, Circuit Judge Kimberly Irving agreed and voided the rezonings: the public notice was legally defective, so the approvals built on it could not stand.

That single ruling erased, at least on paper, the largest data center approval in history. It did not weigh the merits of the project at all. It said the process was broken, and in land use law, a broken process can be fatal.

The developers and the county appealed, and in March 2026 the Virginia Court of Appeals affirmed Judge Irving's ruling. Within weeks the coalition defending the project began to dissolve. In April 2026, Compass Datacenters dropped its appeal. Prince William County, which reporting shows had spent more than $400,000 on outside counsel defending the approvals, exited the fight as well.

That left QTS standing alone. In May 2026 the company appealed to the Supreme Court of Virginia, the last stop available. As of August 2026 that appeal is pending. Unless Virginia's highest court revives the rezonings, the Digital Gateway approvals remain void and the project cannot proceed without starting the approval process over.

The Digital Gateway litigation is now the reference case for a hard truth about data center fights: the size of the project does not insulate it from the smallest defect in the process that approved it. The plaintiffs here did not need to out-spend two national developers and a county government. They needed to show that one legally required step, adequate public notice, was skipped or done wrong.

The same pattern runs through data center challenges nationwide. The Warrenton Amazon case turns on whether a zoning text amendment was properly adopted. The Festus, Missouri suit is built on alleged open meetings law violations. When a local government rushes a data center approval, the rush itself often creates the legal opening. Residents who show up early, request records, and document every step of the process are building the record a lawyer will later need.

For communities earlier in the fight, our guide on how to fight a proposed data center walks through the approval stages where these defects tend to appear.

If a data center has been approved near you and the process felt rushed or opaque, the Digital Gateway case shows the approval may be more vulnerable than it looks. A few practical points:

• Deadlines are short. Challenges to zoning decisions typically must be filed quickly, often within weeks or a few months of the approval depending on the state and the type of claim. An attorney will confirm the deadline that applies to you. Our overview of data center lawsuit deadlines explains why moving fast matters.
• Collect the paper trail. Hearing notices, agendas, meeting minutes, and the published legal ads are all public records, and they are exactly where notice defects hide.
• You do not need to prove harm to void a defective approval. Procedural claims stand on the process itself, though nuisance and damages claims may also be available once a facility is built and operating.

If you live near an approved or proposed data center and want to understand your options, a free case review can connect you with an independent attorney handling data center cases in your state.