TL;DR
A unanimous appellate ruling on March 31 voided 2,000 acres of data-center rezoning in the largest data-center complex ever proposed.
MSM Perspective
Virginia Mercury and Potomac Local focus on the public-notice violation rather than the scale of what was voided.
X Perspective
Data-center skeptics on X treat the Virginia ruling as the first court-level precedent the cascade has produced.
The Virginia Court of Appeals ruled unanimously on March 31 that three Prince William County rezoning ordinances covering roughly 2,000 acres were void from the outset because the county's advertising for the December 2023 public hearings violated both state law and the county's own zoning ordinance. [1] The three rezonings — Compass, Digital Gateway North and Digital Gateway South — would have allowed up to 37 data centers operating around the clock near Manassas National Battlefield Park. [1] The Compass site alone spans 884 acres and 11.5 million square feet of proposed floor area. [1]
The paper's Saturday piece on how Virginia's local data-center rules surfaced in the wake of the Mills ruling treated this as the judicial layer of a federalism cascade. Judge Stuart A. Raphael's opinion fills that layer. The appeals court upheld Circuit Court Judge Kimberly Irving's August 2025 decision, which had invalidated the rezonings after a five-day bench trial. [2] The court found that the county's planned November 28, 2023 advertisement never ran because the clerk failed to submit it. Substitute ads on December 2, 5 and 9 came before the county had made its own ordinances available for review on December 7 — a violation of the "where-to-review" notice requirement. [2]
The ruling's reach is constrained. The Board of Supervisors and the two developers, H&H Capital Acquisitions and GW Acquisition Co., have 30 days from the opinion to appeal to the Supreme Court of Virginia. Opponents — the Oak Valley Homeowners Association and six groups that filed amicus briefs — are urging the board to drop the case. [3] The county has already approved $1.6 million in legal spending on the dispute. [3]
The Board of Supervisors is advancing a zoning text amendment to eliminate by-right data-center development by September. [3] For now, the largest proposed data-center complex in the United States is procedurally dead. Any resurrected version requires a new hearing that complies with notice law. The cascade has its precedent.
-- DAVID CHEN, Beijing
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