Just 35% of Virginia voters now say they would be comfortable with a new data center going up in their community, down from 69% in 2023, according to a Washington Post-Schar School poll published Wednesday.
This comes just one day after Prince William County's Board of Supervisors voted to drop its appeals defending the Prince William Digital Gateway, ending years of legal effort to revive a 2,100-acre, 37-building campus that, at full buildout, would have been one of the largest data center developments in the country, if not the world.
The region already anchors a great deal of global hyperscaler capacity, as northern Virginia’s data center load exceeds 4,900 MW. And the Digital Gateway alone was sized up for multi-gigawatt demand, across some 22 million square feet of building space and 14 dedicated electrical substations.
Approved by an outgoing Prince William Board of Supervisors in December 2023 after a 27-hour public meeting, the QTS and Compass Datacenters project was challenged by the Oak Valley Homeowners Association and the American Battlefield Trust, on the grounds that the county's hearing notices didn’t meet state or local advertising requirements. A circuit court judge voided the rezonings last August, and on March 31 of this year, a three-judge panel at the Virginia Court of Appeals upheld that ruling. Prince William’s vote on Tuesday shut the door on a Virginia Supreme Court appeal.
Data Center Watch, a tracker run by 10a Labs, recorded 48 data center projects blocked or delayed across the United States in 2025, preventing roughly $156 billion in planned development, with 57 active grassroots opposition groups now operating in Virginia, more than any other state. The government affairs firm MultiState logged 238 state legislative proposals last year aimed at restricting data center development, of which 40 passed. Maine lawmakers added another on Tuesday, passing a measure that blocks new builds drawing more than 20 MW until autumn 2027.
Compass and QTS haven't said where the cancelled Digital Gateway capacity will be redirected. Capacity that fails to land in Loudoun or Prince William typically pushes south or west into the Richmond metro and the Roanoke Valley, both of which have seen their own community pushback over the past year.
However, a wider question exists around fiber latency, because the Ashburn cluster handles a majority of trans-Atlantic and U.S. East Coast peering. Rerouting AI inference workloads outside there introduces measurable costs that hyperscalers have so far been willing to pay a premium to avoid.
