Prince William County

Prince William County's Board of Supervisors voted 8-0 on 7 July 2026 to deny the Dulles South Innovation Center, a proposed 1,940-acre, 43-million-square-foot data-centre campus in the Gainesville district, under the county's Data Center Opportunity Zone Overlay and its 2040 Comprehensive Plan. It is the county's second major 2026 rejection of a mega-campus, after the Digital Gateway rezoning was voided by the Virginia Court of Appeals in April for inadequate public notice. Unlike that earlier defeat, the Dulles South denial came through the Board's own ordinary zoning process, with no litigation required.

The Digital Gateway defeat traced to a fast-tracked 2,000-acre rezoning near Manassas National Battlefield Park that the Virginia Court of Appeals overturned in late April 2026, upholding a lower court's finding that the Board had not provided adequate public notice. Compass Datacenters withdrew that project and declined to appeal. The ruling formed part of a concurrent three-county tightening of Northern Virginia's approval environment: Loudoun stripped by-right zoning and Fairfax added setbacks and noise studies in the same week.

Prince William County is a rapidly growing Virginia county with a population of approximately 500,000, located southwest of the Washington, DC metropolitan area. It is the third major data-centre jurisdiction in Northern Virginia after Loudoun and Fairfax, with several thousand acres of planned or approved data-centre land near the intersection of Route 234 and I-66.

Two mega-campus rejections in a single year mark a shift from Prince William's earlier positioning as a growth alternative to a more constrained Loudoun. The Dulles South denial shows the county's own Data Center Opportunity Zone Overlay, adopted after the Digital Gateway defeat, now doing the gatekeeping work that previously required a court to intervene: future large-scale rezonings in the county face both procedural scrutiny and substantive overlay review before they can proceed.