Bloomberg复盘弗吉尼亚Digital Gateway数据中心项目被社区反对和诉讼推翻

On the edge of a Civil War battlefield, a modern-day fight erupted.

The catalyst? A data center campus roughly twice the size of New York’s Central Park, with up to 37 buildings and city-sized power needs — all tied to private equity.

Data center landlords bankrolled by Blackstone Inc. and Brookfield Asset Management planned a $100 billion project after promising life-changing money to property owners in Virginia's Prince William County. Dozens of residents sold more than 1,600 acres (647 hectares) to the developers in time for the AI boom, and another 200 banded together to sell 1,900 acres for more data centers.

Others — including a group of fired-up retirees from a gated senior housing estate nearby — mobilized to save the community. They stormed a marathon 27-hour zoning meeting and filed two lawsuits centered on a fateful clerical error around newspaper advertisements for the event. And they engineered pressure campaigns that hardened county officials’ stance against data centers.

“Outrage and spare time are a dangerous combination,” said retired Navy captain Bill Wright.

The effort took five years — and ultimately toppled one of the world’s largest data center projects. Brookfield-backed Compass Datacenters backed out from developing 800-plus acres in April; Blackstone’s QTS followed suit in July. It also created a stress-tested blueprint for activists and added momentum to growing national backlash against the sprawling facilities central to the AI boom.

What started as a grassroots movement is now a force that’s swaying midterm elections in states across the country and proving costly for Democrats and Republicans to ignore. New York placed a moratorium on data centers and Texas enacted effective freezes on new developments. The race for a crucial Ohio Senate seat is now a referendum over data centers. Opponents have become more sophisticated, disrupting at least 75 sites in the first quarter.

The backlash has grown so intense that President Donald Trump weighed in this week blasting the opposition, saying communities should “let Data Reign” if they want to be rich and successful.

The community pushback is a reality check for the tech firms racing to build human-like intelligence and investment giants staking their futures on being bigger financiers of digital infrastructure. Developers who already faced daunting challenges amassing land and energy to power AI data centers are now contending with the seven out of ten Americans who don’t want to live next to the structures, fearing noise, high-voltage lines and plummeting home values.

The Virginia project, known as the Digital Gateway, marked the opponents’ biggest casualty yet. This account of how it happened is based on public records requests and conversations with dozens of people.

“Our decision to exit was not purely a financial calculation,” Compass Chief Executive Officer Chris Crosby said in a statement to Bloomberg. “The community partnership that is essential to how Compass operates had suffered irreversible harm,” he said, adding that the company didn’t want to drag landowners through more uncertainty.

QTS said it “remains focused on bringing benefits of the digital economy to communities that want to embrace growth, strengthen their economic future, and build the infrastructure that powers America's economy.”

Finding those communities is getting harder. Trillions of dollars are on the line.

“The data center industry never anticipated how big the opposition would be,” said Glenn Davis, who led the Virginia Department of Energy and now advises states, utilities and developers. “They’ve allowed the naysayers to create the narrative — and it’s a lot easier to create one than to change one.”

Land Rush

Two longtime friends in Prince William County had competing visions.

Mac Haddow, a homeowner association president, helped drive the legal attacks that set back developers by millions. Josiah Hunter, who attends the same church, was organizing neighbors to sell more land for data centers. “If we don’t do something, we’re going to get all the bad effects from development, and none of the good,” said Hunter, 49. He urged Haddow, 76, to shape the projects rather than resist.

Haddow told Hunter that the fight was bigger than himself.

​The conflict started seven years ago, when Mary Ann Ghadban, a real estate broker with a 55-acre farm, asked the area’s biggest property owners to sell land with her. Dominion Energy Inc.’s power lines slice through their land, a symbol of the transformation of an agricultural area into a suburban community where more data centers were closing in. Ghadban bet that many of her neighbors were ready to move.

“Our two-lane road has become a major industrial/commuter cut-through,” she later wrote to a local elected official. The high-voltage lines had hurt farming too. “We have all experienced stillborn calves and foals due to the high electromagnetic fields.”

She and her allies thought data centers would be the path of least political resistance, expanding the commercial tax base without straining public schools in the same way as suburban sprawl. Their gamble roiled an enclave of equestrian farms, gated communities and rolling hills, where thousands died when Confederate forces overwhelmed Union soldiers in the 1860s. Over the years, residents had rallied around the Manassas National Battlefield Park and nearby development-free zones, fending off a Disney theme park and a traffic parkway.

But word spread about the chance to sell land and become a millionaire. County officials saw dollar signs and encouraged the deals. No one wanted to be left behind.

Land that once sold for $200,000 an acre at most was now going for up to five times as much. QTS, just after its 2021 purchase by Blackstone, was on a land-banking spree and agreed to pay landowners as much as half a million dollars per acre. Compass offered roughly double that to convince those with smaller plots to give up their homes. Landowners agreed to sell more than 1,600 acres.

There was a catch. Neighbors had to sell in groups, and they could only cash in after the county freed up agricultural land for industrial use. But the developers locked the sellers into confidentiality agreements — meaning people didn’t always know when their neighbors had incentives to push a data center development.

“It’s common, but it could lead to distrust about a project,” said Al Maiorino, the president of Public Strategy Group, who works with landowners and developers on campaigns.

Others were left with two choices: join the land grab or resist.

Mac Haddow decided to fight. The president of the Oak Valley Homeowners Association since 2003, he’d survived Christmas decoration spats and an attempted coup. He’d been through other brawls as the late Republican senator Orrin Hatch’s campaign man, and now as a lobbyist advocating for broad access to kratom, the botanical substance with opioid-like effects.

On learning about the data center, the subdivision spun up a committee with resident lawyers. They volunteered thousands of hours devising challenges, and some went door-to-door recruiting other locals who lived near the site. Oak Valley operated behind the scenes, leaving others to be the vocal opponents.

The late conservationist Kim Hosen had long fought for the “rural crescent” — land once protected from development that the data centers would now encroach on. To fight the Digital Gateway, she roped in the Sierra Club and the National Parks Conservation Association, which enlisted more preservationist groups. The way to win this fight is to give it a life of its own, she told another organizer.

A burgeoning political machine encouraged residents to vote, speak out and file Freedom of Information Act requests.

Elena Schlossberg, who lived near the mountains and bred chickens, had pushed Dominion to bury power lines as the executive director of nonprofit Coalition to Protect Prince William County.

In 2021, she, Hosen and others were invited to Heritage Hunt, a gated senior community known for its golf course, high voter turnout, and a ballroom that’s a campaign stop for politicians. Several residents began studying data center noise and investigating entanglements between developers and local officials. “We became a thorn in their side,” said Bill Wright, the Navy veteran.

Schlossberg worked with the group — which Wright, 70, dubbed the Gray Gladiators — on public attacks to shame a county supervisor who had sold land to Compass. As sentiment shifted within the community, the official also faced threats of violence from unknown sources and found a dead animal on the center of his driveway. He ultimately resigned after the commonwealth further restricted what he could vote on.

Wright became campaign treasurer for Deshundra Jefferson, a political outsider whose message against data center sprawl won her the top seat at the panel that decides on developments. The Digital Gateway stood less of a chance once she got to office in 2024.

Loud Proponents

Compass and QTS pushed for the panel to vote on the projects sooner than later, ahead of the leadership change. Pressures were creeping up. Both companies’ lobbyists joined an industry push to fend off a Virginia bill restricting data centers near historical sites. The campus would call for some 3.5 gigawatts of electricity — roughly equivalent to the power needs of Tampa, Florida, according to research firm Enverus — and the public was catching on to AI’s strain on grids.

Blackstone was eager to supply QTS with cash and connections to become the fastest-growing company of its kind. It introduced QTS to public affairs firm Narrative Strategies, which shaped messages around tax benefits and job creation to sway local officials. Blackstone President Jon Gray touted on a 2023 shareholder call how QTS had leased more capacity after its takeover. Meanwhile, QTS donated money to support the local youth baseball league’s trip to the Babe Ruth World Series.

The Digital Gateway stood to eventually bring $400 million in yearly tax revenue. LSI Communications, a community relations group with links to former county officials, supported Compass’s efforts and ginned up social media campaigns touting the economic benefits. In the leadup to the zoning, Compass got deep-pocketed backers when Brookfield and Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan acquired the company.

Meanwhile, Compass advisors made sure a local town hall wasn’t structured as an open-mic session for activists to stage spectacles. They encouraged landowners to show up at public events. More joined in.

“As soon as the county entertained the Digital Gateway, the genie was out of the bottle,” said Hunter, the businessman who invited neighbors to his house to discuss selling more land for data centers. People said it was a matter of time before development squeezed them and utilities seized their land for road or power upgrades.

The strategy involved extending planned data centers to create a corridor. Hunter, who is involved in a government contracting firm and other businesses, came to see the project as a vote for America's national security. “Whoever wins the AI race is going to dominate not just the economic landscape, but the military landscape,” he said.

Some neighbors became loud proponents of the Digital Gateway.

“Many of us have signs in our yard opposing this, but I for one will be taking mine down and showing support,” one wrote in an email to neighbors. Their land stood to sell at even higher prices to data center developers, because it hugged Loudoun County, a connectivity hub processing much of the world’s Internet traffic.

27-Hour Meeting

Competing interests collided at a 27-hour hearing in 2023. Lawyers for QTS and Compass presented pitches to county staff, who said the plans were lacking. Landowners, union workers and residents lobbied officials all night. In a nearby room, developers and advisers wrangled over last-minute commitments on green space and energy, expanding on earlier promises to protect historic resources and use earth tones when building.

Hanging over the spectacle: the question of whether the meeting had been properly advertised. The first two out of three newspaper notices were spaced three days apart, not the minimum of six that opponents flagged that state and local codes required.

After the county board voted to approve the projects, organizers got to work. If the Digital Gateway went forward, it would not only validate that the land was beyond the point of preservation, it would also give the industry permission to build in historical areas, their thinking went. That data center was the “tumor around which other developments could take shape,” said Schlossberg.

She helped connect residents to the American Battlefield Trust, a nonprofit that preserves battlefield land. They filed a lawsuit that opened with a preamble on the skirmishes between Confederate and Union forces — a plea to history and donors. As Oak Valley’s legal committee hammered out a separate lawsuit, the Gray Gladiators raised money and helped with the legal strategy. They talked local businesses into volunteering cleaning services and bed-and-breakfast stays for silent auctions. The donations augmented HOA assessment fees levied on more than 200 households.

In the middle of the fight, Steve Ward, a cybersecurity executive, asked for his name to be taken off the American Battlefield Trust’s lawsuit. He heard other landowners speak at a town hall and didn’t want to block their path to wealth. He also organized neighbors to sell some 255 acres for a residential development.

“The Digital Gateway was a signal that the private sector saw opportunity in the corridor,” he said. For those with large tracts, “the time was right to meet that opportunity.”

He wasn’t the only plaintiff whom developers were trying to woo. To set the stage for truce, a local consultant who works with developers dangled a prize to Haddow for dropping the fight: The neighboring community of homes could be turned into a recreation area and buffer against the Digital Gateway. For Haddow, that overture presented more questions than answers.

“I told them to go pound sand,” he said.

Compass then broached a settlement involving cash and funding that Oak Valley HOA could opt to use on amenities like a clubhouse and ball fields. The association consulted residents and then countered for more money to make up for potential declines in property values.

The two sides faced off in court last year. A clerk fielded questions over what emails she sent — or, more crucially, hadn’t sent — when firming up the advertising schedule. Compass, QTS and the county deployed six law firms against the small husband-and-wife firm representing Oak Valley, arguing the administrative error caused no violation or harm.

In one ruling, a court found that the zoning hearing for the Digital Gateway was void, because of a clerical blunder related to public notices. Virginia’s court of appeals upheld the decision. Even as the American Battlefield Trust lawsuit ran into early challenges, that court ruled on both cases at once, giving all groups a collective victory.

Davis said the failure of the Digital Gateway came down to a technicality. “But it was significant opposition that used that technicality – and overturned the project,” he said.

Residents chided the county for spending $1.7 million in taxpayer dollars for legal defense efforts that some viewed as an assault against their wishes. In April, the county withdrew from the lawsuit, leaving QTS and Compass with a narrow legal path.

That's when Crosby, the Compass CEO, decided to pull out. Against the counsel of advisors, his company chose to eat the tens of millions of dollars it had sunk into the project. It also paid the extra taxes that landowners faced after their property was rezoned for data centers.

“Continuing to fight would have meant asking nearly 100 families to remain in legal and financial limbo for another two to three years with no certainty of a different outcome,” he said. “We were not willing to do that to people who had trusted us.”

‘Catastrophic’

With Compass out, QTS would now have to pay for utility upgrades that were originally shared costs, on top of the tens of millions already spent to procure power and pay taxes for some landowners. Blackstone executives, who had gotten more involved in decisions around the site after the lawsuits, grew concerned that the data center landlord was throwing good money after bad. Meanwhile, the landowners had sued to unwind their deals with QTS. After five years of waiting for a payday that never materialized, they wanted to move on.

The overturning of the Digital Gateway was “catastrophic to our community,” Ghadban, the woman who corralled neighbors to sell land, told officials this year. The opposition “created a narrative that is overriding that of the actual property owners,” she said. Ghadban didn't respond to requests for comment.

HOA president Haddow continued his crusade, less quietly now. The land rush around him “pit neighbor against neighbor,” he told state senators at a raucous townhall in June, before Virginia levied a new electricity tax on data centers.

By then, local data center protests had coalesced into a national movement. Trump ramped up pressure on big tech companies and developers to pay for the full costs of their electricity needs. In Virginia, Governor Abigail Spanberger moved to intervene in the state’s review of NextEra Energy Inc.’s planned $67 billion acquisition of Dominion Energy, based on concerns the deal would increase household bills. Dominion said a combination would strengthen its ability to provide affordable and reliable power for all customers.

In July, QTS notified Virginia’s high court that it was bowing out of the fight. Top executives no longer considered the Digital Gateway compatible with QTS’s image. They recognized they should have built stronger community ties before making deals with landowners. Now they needed to focus on building where data centers were welcome and not opposed.

“We’re proud of the critical digital infrastructure that QTS continues to build around the U.S. and the partnerships it is fostering with the communities in which it operates,” Blackstone said in a statement.

The next domino fell days later.

County officials voted not to initiate a land-use review for the data center plan that Hunter had championed. Seven out of eight county supervisors overruled a request by the developers for more time to revise the proposal.

Haddow and Hunter spoke after the ruling. Even though they’re on different sides on the issue, they remain friends.

Landowners have been quietly mobilizing to sell hundreds more acres. Hunter’s neighbors may not have a choice. Dominion Energy has told them that their homes are on a planned expansion of a high voltage transmission corridor — one that feeds the world’s biggest concentration of data centers.