Blackstone’s QTS is stepping away from a massive data center plan in Prince William County and has dropped its legal effort to pursue the project.
“After careful consideration, QTS has made the decision to terminate the Digital Gateway project and withdraw its associated filings,” QTS said Friday in an emailed statement to Bisnow.
Blackstone’s data center arm on Thursday notified the Virginia Supreme Court that it was withdrawing its petitions to appeal a lower court decision that voided the rezoning approvals needed for the PW Digital Gateway project to move forward.
QTS executives decided the litigation wasn’t worth pressing forward, according to Bloomberg, which first reported the news.
The decision is a win for landowners, advocacy groups and other opponents who had been fighting against the project. If it had proceeded, the Digital Gateway project could have become one of the largest data center clusters in the world.
QTS’ withdrawal was a result of the plaintiffs’ legal strategy and public pressure on the county board, said Craig Blakeley, a member of Alliance Law Group and counsel for Oak Valley Homeowners Association, the lead plaintiff in the litigation.
“The legal arguments we presented allowed the courts to see through our opponents’ attempts to confuse the issues and correctly decide the case based on the facts and the law,” Blakeley said in an email.
In April, the Board of County Supervisors dropped its legal defense of the 2,100-acre rezoning effort following the Virginia Court of Appeals ruling. Compass Datacenters, the other developer in the project, abandoned the fight. But QTS appealed to the state’s top court.
QTS said in its statement on Friday that the project would have delivered “tens of billions of dollars in capital investment, substantial annual local tax revenues to support public services, and thousands of long-term jobs.”
It said it will move forward with “a responsible and orderly termination of project activities.”
UPDATE, JULY 3, 6:15 P.M. ET: This story was updated with a comment from counsel for the Oak Valley Homeowners Association.
