Appearing to give in to multiple communities’ widespread opposition, Blackstone’s commercial real estate arm, QTS Realty Trust, has pulled out of a 2,100-acre data center campus known as Prince William Digital Gateway, which was projected to include up to 37 data center buildings and headed to becoming the world’s largest such campus. The plan had been adopted in 2022 by the Prince William County Board of Supervisors. Blackstone’s partner in the huge deal, Compass Datacenters, which was supposed to build on 800 acres of the site, had withdrawn from the deal in May. So, the supposed-to-be-$100-billion-potential Digital Gateway megaproject in Virginia’s “data center alley” looks to be on life-support now.
Only a couple of days earlier, the ZeroHedge website had reported that Blackstone had sold its interests in three other data center projects in the same area of Northern Virginia. Those shares of data centers in Manassas and Sterling, Virginia were purchased from Blackstone by Digital Realty Trust.