➤ Key Highlights
Compass Datacenters formally walked away from the 2,100-acre Prince William Digital Gateway near Manassas Battlefield on April 29, declining to appeal further.
The kill shot was procedural — a March 31 Virginia Court of Appeals ruling voided the rezoning over notice violations under VA Code §15.2-2204. Not NIMBY politics, not environmental review. A statutory technicality.
Blackstone-owned QTS filed a notice of appeal to the Virginia Supreme Court hours before the April 30 deadline, keeping a sliver of the project alive.
Prince William County's Board of Supervisors withdrew its own defense April 15 after burning $1.72M in taxpayer funds — the public-sector partner abandoned the developer mid-litigation.
The voided entitlement covered ~17 GW of planned capacity in the corridor that already hosts roughly 13% of global data center capacity.
➤ SIGNAL
A multi-billion-dollar entitlement, fully approved by the local jurisdiction, was unwound years later by an appellate court because the notice procedure under state code was defective. The developer didn't lose on the merits of the project. They lost on how the public hearing was advertised. That's the part the market hasn't fully metabolized yet.
Our angle: Every data center underwriting model in 2026 was built around two risks — power availability and tenant credit. This ruling adds a third: latent statutory-notice risk that survives the entitlement closing. That's a category of risk most developers, lenders, and title insurers don't currently price. The PW Digital Gateway didn't fail because the project was bad. It failed because Virginia's notice statute is more demanding than the county process assumed, and an appellate panel was willing to enforce it strictly.
Implications for CRE:
Title insurance and entitlement reps tighten across the data center asset class. Expect lender-side counsel to demand independent statutory-notice opinions on every Northern Virginia rezoning closed in the last 36 months.
Capital migrates to jurisdictions with cleaner entitlement records. Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, Georgia — already accelerating (see Meta Lebanon, Oracle/Related Saline) — get a structural tailwind worth billions in deployed capital.
The bottleneck shifts from physical to legal. Equinix's Q1 disclosure said power is the binding constraint. PW Digital Gateway proves the binding constraint is now bifurcated — power and defensible entitlements.
CMBS and private credit underwriting recalibrates. Hyperscale debt was being priced on tenant credit (Amazon, Microsoft, Oracle, Meta). Now it has to be priced on rezoning durability, and that's a discount to par.
Land basis in the Loudoun/Manassas corridor becomes harder to defend. Sellers holding entitled positions in NoVa just watched the most aggressive comp evaporate. Repricing follows.
➤ TAKEAWAY
Entitlement risk doesn't end at the rezoning vote anymore — it ends when the appellate clock runs out, and that can be years later. For data center developers, lenders, and the secondary market for entitled land, this ruling changes which jurisdictions are actually worth paying premium basis to enter.
