Virginia law requires public hearing notices to run in a newspaper at least six days apart. Prince William County's were not. That sentence ended a $100bn project.

The Digital Gateway was to be roughly 2,100 acres and 22 million square feet of gigawatt scale data centre capacity, one of the largest ever proposed. A judge revoked the zoning authorisation in August 2025 over the improper notices, the Virginia Court of Appeals upheld it on 31 March 2026, Compass Datacenters walked in May, and in July QTS, owned by Blackstone, withdrew its remaining petitions. The project is dead.

Why this one is different

Every AI compute announcement is a number attached to a building that does not exist yet, and this is what the gap between those two things looks like. Not a funding failure, not a demand failure, not a technology failure. Years of litigation and a procedural defect in how a county advertised its own hearings, against a backdrop of sustained local opposition.

Every compute announcement is a number attached to a building that does not exist yet.

How we got here

1. 2023Prince William County approves the rezonings after contested hearings and organised local opposition.
2. Aug 2025A judge revokes the zoning over public notices not spaced six days apart.
3. 31 Mar 2026The Virginia Court of Appeals upholds the ruling.
4. May 2026Compass Datacenters exits, leaving QTS alone on the project.
5. 9 Jul 2026QTS withdraws its petitions. The project officially dies.

What it does and does not mean

One project failing is not a pattern, capacity is being built at pace elsewhere, and none of this says demand is not real. But set it against the compute commitments now being signed, tens of billions at a time on multi year terms, and the lesson is where the risk actually sits. The constraint on AI infrastructure is not capital or chips. It is land, power and the people who live next to it, and none of those are on the roadmap.