The Prince William County Board of Supervisors voted 8-0 on Tuesday 7 July to deny the Dulles South Innovation Center, a 1,940-acre, 43-million-square-foot data-centre campus proposed by Sanders Lage Assemblage I LLC in the Gainesville district. 1 Prince William sits at the western edge of the world's densest data-centre cluster, so a refusal here carries weight a rural county's would not. County staff had recommended denial because the site lay outside the Data Center Opportunity Zone Overlay District, the area zoned for such builds.
Supervisors cited the Occoquan watershed, which supplies drinking water to eight million people, and rejected what they called piecemeal development outside the county's 2040 Comprehensive Plan. No lawsuit, no new statute, no moratorium.
This was the county's second mega-rejection of 2026, and the more durable one. The neighbouring Digital Gateway campus died by a court ruling that voided its fast-track rezoning, and its developers dropped their remaining appeals the same week . Dulles South died by ordinary zoning, a refusal no appeal can easily reopen because the county simply applied rules it already held.
The demand behind the refusal has not moved: 43 million square feet of proposed capacity, in the busiest data-centre market on earth, blocked by tools already on the books.
