The single largest data-center rezoning loss in Virginia history is now final at the local level. On April 7, 2026, the Prince William County Board of Supervisors passed a resolution directing counsel not to appeal in the Prince William Digital Gateway rezoning lawsuits, Nicole Brown, the county's communications director, told Virginia Mercury. The Board confirmed the position with a unanimous formal vote on Tuesday, April 14. The county had spent at least $1.6 million defending the rezonings before withdrawing. Developer-defendants Compass and QTS retain a 30-day window to appeal to the Virginia Supreme Court; the appeals court maintained a partial stay except for a ban on land-disturbing activities.
The ruling came down on March 31, 2026. A unanimous three-judge Virginia Court of Appeals panel — Stuart A. Raphael, Randolph A. Beales, and David Bernhard — held that the Compass, Digital Gateway North, and Digital Gateway South rezonings were invalid from the start, treated by the law as if they had never been adopted. The cases were two consolidated challenges (Oak Valley HOA, Record Nos. 1584-25-4 / 1590-25-4 / 1592-25-4; Burke et al., Record No. 2025-24-4), heard February 24, 2026 in Arlington. Per Patch's reporting on the 53-page opinion, the county clerk failed to confirm the publication request with The Washington Post by the deadline; the county “scrambled” by running three alternative ads on December 2, 5, and 9, 2023, which failed both Code § 15.2-2204(A)'s six-day-between requirement and the county's own zoning ordinance § 32-700.60 five-day requirement. The proposed ordinances were not available for public review until December 7 — after the first two ads had run. The court rejected the county's argument that residents' attendance at the hearing cured the advertising failure. The Board had approved the rezonings on a 4-3 vote with one abstention, in what the American Battlefield Trust framed as a lame-duck push by supervisors whose terms were about to expire.
The more consequential new finding in this week's Virginia Mercury syndication is not the court ruling but an academic disclosure of how data-center siting decisions get made when no court is watching. Dr. Eric Bonds, associate professor of sociology at UMW, and UMW student Viktor Newby submitted FOIA requests across Virginia and quantified the practice. The finding, originally in Virginia Mercury's “FOIA Friday” on October 25, 2024: NDAs between data-center developers and 25 of 31 Virginia localities with proposed or existing data centers — roughly 80%. The agreements were broadly written to prohibit sharing “business plans” and “non-public information.” On April 13, 2026, the Virginia Coalition for Open Government announced an award for Bonds.
The state-level stakes. João Ferreira of the UVA Weldon Cooper Center named the dynamic “race to the bottom” on the record. The Piedmont Environmental Council puts its data-center map total at roughly 370 million square feet of existing and proposed data centers in Virginia. Dominion Energy is processing 70 gigawatts of new connection requests from data-center developers waiting to plug in — about 2.8x its all-time peak demand of 24,678 MW (January 23, 2025; these are requests in line, not signed contracts). State budget negotiations remain stalled over the Senate's pitch to end the data-center sales-and-use-tax exemption, which cost $928 million in fiscal 2023, the most recent disclosed year.