The bullshit of running unripe ideas at mentally ill scale using energy that doesn't exist and starts to deflate
https://oilprice.com/Energy/Energy-General/Largest-Data-Center-Project-
Ever-Proposed-Is-Officially-Dead.html
Largest Data Center Project Ever Proposed Is Officially Dead
> The largest data center project ever proposed in the U.S. is officially dead.
> Blackstone-owned QTS Realty Trust withdrew its appeal to the Virginia Supreme Court on July 2, closing out a three-year legal fight over the Prince William Digital Gateway, a planned 2,100-acre campus in Prince William County, Virginia that would have packed 37 buildings and 22 million square feet of data centers next to Manassas National Battlefield Park. At full build-out, the project carried an estimated $100 billion price tag and would have been the largest data center complex in the world.
> QTS withdrew its Virginia Supreme Court appeal on July 2, killing the 2,100-acre, roughly $100 billion Digital Gateway campus for good.
> The retreat follows a March court ruling that voided the project's 2023 rezoning over a notice error, and lands days after Blackstone sold a majority stake in three other Northern Virginia data centers to Digital Realty.
> Blackstone's broader data center business is unaffected: it still manages more than $150 billion in digital infrastructure assets and just took its acquisition REIT public in May.
> QTS was the last developer standing. Co-developer Compass Datacenters, backed by Brookfield, dropped its own appeal in April, and the Prince William Board of County Supervisors withdrew from the litigation the same month after spending nearly $2 million in taxpayer funds defending the original rezoning. That approval, granted in 2023, was voided by the Virginia Court of Appeals in March, which found the county's public notice for the rezoning hearing fell short of the state's six-day spacing requirement between newspaper notices.
> The retreat comes days after Blackstone agreed to hand Digital Realty full ownership of three built-and-leased Northern Virginia data centers valued at $7.8 billion, in a $3.5 billion cash-and-stock deal. That transaction extends an existing joint venture rather than an exit, but the timing puts fresh attention on how Blackstone is managing its data center bets in the state that hosts more capacity than anywhere else in the world.
