Blackstone's QTS Abandons Digital Gateway Project, Ends Legal Fight
Blackstone’s QTS is stepping away from a massive data center plan in Prince William County and has dropped its legal effort to pursue the project.
“After careful consideration, QTS has made the decision to terminate the Digital Gateway project and withdraw its associated filings,” QTS said Friday in an emailed statement to Bisnow.
Blackstone’s data center arm on Thursday notified the Virginia Supreme Court that it was withdrawing its petitions to appeal a lower court decision that voided the rezoning approvals needed for the PW Digital Gateway project to move forward.
QTS executives decided the litigation wasn't worth pressing forward, according to Bloomberg, which first reported the news.
The decision is a win for landowners, advocacy groups and other data center opponents who had been fighting against the project. If it had proceeded, the Digital Gateway project could have become one of the largest data center clusters in the world.
In April, the Board of County Supervisors dropped its legal defense of the 2,100-acre rezoning effort following the Virginia Court of Appeals ruling. Compass Datacenters, the other developer in the project, abandoned the fight. But QTS appealed to the state’s top court.
QTS said in its statement on Friday that the project would have delivered “tens of billions of dollars in capital investment, substantial annual local tax revenues to support public services, and thousands of long-term jobs.”
It said it will move forward with “a responsible and orderly termination of project activities.”
