Prince William County

Prince William County's Board of Supervisors saw its fast-tracked 2,000-acre data-centre rezoning near Manassas National Battlefield Park overturned by the Virginia Court of Appeals in late April 2026. The court upheld a lower-court finding that the board had not provided adequate public notice before approving the rezoning. Compass Datacenters withdrew the project and declined to appeal. The ruling forms part of a concurrent three-county tightening of Northern Virginia's data-centre 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. The county has been more aggressive than its neighbours in pursuing large-scale data-centre development, including the 2,000-acre rezoning that the Court of Appeals overturned.

The court ruling changed the dynamic in Prince William: the county had positioned itself as a growth alternative to an increasingly constrained Loudoun, but the judicial defeat exposes the limits of administrative fast-tracking as a strategy. Future large-scale rezonings in the county will require careful procedural compliance to survive legal challenge, effectively aligning Prince William with the more cautious approval approaches now standard in Loudoun and Fairfax.