Prince William County lost the two largest campuses ever proposed here. The market you can lease is in Manassas.

Why this county has its own page

Prince William County is Northern Virginia. No buyer calls it anything else, and our Northern Virginia guide is still the right place to start for the market as a whole. This page exists because one thing here is different enough to need the room: the entitlement process, which in this county has stopped more announced capacity than it has approved.

The county sits south and west of Loudoun, wrapped around the independent cities of Manassas and Manassas Park, and it has two distinct halves. The eastern half, in and around Manassas, is a built market with operating multi-tenant buildings, carrier presence and an established industrial base near the regional airport. The western half, out toward Gainesville and Haymarket, is farmland and battlefield country, and it is where every large campus proposal of the last four years has been aimed and where each of them has run into organised opposition.

Reading those two halves as one market is the mistake this page exists to prevent. The eastern half is leasable today. The western half has produced enormous announced figures and, so far, very little that a tenant can occupy.

Everything on this page counts only Prince William County and the Manassas cities. Figures for Ashburn, Sterling, Reston and the rest of the region sit on the Northern Virginia page, and no building is counted on both.

Two of the largest campuses ever proposed died here in one week

This is the most important thing a buyer needs to know about Prince William County, and it is recent enough that a lot of market material still has not caught up with it.

The PW Digital Gateway was a corridor of roughly 2,100 acres near Manassas National Battlefield Park, planned at about 23 million square feet and developed by QTS and Compass Datacenters. The Board of Supervisors approved the rezonings in December 2023 after a marathon hearing. In August 2025 the Prince William Circuit Court voided those approvals, and the reason matters: the county failed to run one of the two newspaper advertisements its own notice rules required. The Virginia Court of Appeals affirmed that in March 2026. The county declined to appeal further in April, Compass withdrew, and QTS withdrew the last petition at the Supreme Court of Virginia on 2 July 2026.

Five days later, on 7 July 2026, the Board voted 8-0 against the comprehensive plan amendment behind a separate proposal, Dulles South, of roughly 1,940 acres. County staff had recommended denial. A unanimous board vote against a data center proposal in Northern Virginia is not a routine event.

Neither project was refused on its technical merits. The Gateway fell on an advertisement that never ran, and the second fell on a plan amendment that the board would not make. For a buyer the lesson is the same either way: in this county, entitlement is the binding constraint, not power and not land.

What has been announced in Prince William County

Announcements are not filings. Nobody has to build what they announce, the figure is the one the developer chose to publish, and the date moves. They are here because megawatts are what a requirement is measured in, and because the size of what is coming changes who will take your call. Every figure below was read on the page it links to.

Announced capacity is collected by hand from trade reporting and company statements, and each figure links to the report it came from. It is kept apart from the permit record above and never added to it: one is a document a jurisdiction issued, the other is a plan a company published. Neither is availability.

Who is actually plugged in across Prince William County

A building existing and a building being connected are different facts, and only one of them decides whether your traffic can get where it needs to go cheaply. These figures come from PeeringDB, which the network operators themselves maintain, so every row below links to the building's own public entry.

The most connected buildings here

From PeeringDB, which is maintained by the network operators present in these buildings rather than by the landlords, which is what makes it worth more than a directory. Two limits. Entries are voluntary, so a building showing no networks may be single tenant or may simply never have registered. And a network being present says nothing about whether the building has space, power or a price for you: that is still a call.

What the county's own registry shows, and why it is not a permit record

Prince William publishes something most jurisdictions do not: a registry of data center projects with a status on each one. That is richer than the building permit feeds we collect elsewhere, because a permit tells you a filing happened and this tells you what stage the county believes the project is at. It is also weaker in one specific way, and the difference decides how the figures below should be read.

A building permit is a document that had to be issued before work could start. A registry entry is the county's record of a project, and most of these are at a stage where nothing has been built and nothing may ever be. So the status column is the number that matters here, not the total. Twenty-nine of these sites are recorded as under construction, and those are the closest thing in this set to the evidence a permit gives. The rest record intent at varying distances from a shovel.

Because these are planning records rather than permits, they are counted as their own market and are never added to the Northern Virginia permit count. Mixing the two would produce a bigger number that meant less.

The county's own data center registry, which records a project status rather than a permit and covers the Digital Gateway, Manassas and Gainesville. Every figure below is a count of filings we collected ourselves, and every row links to the record it came from.

Operators appearing by name: Amazon Web Services (23), STACK Infrastructure (11), Microsoft (10), Iron Mountain (6), QTS (3), Yondr (3), Aligned (2), Digital Realty (2).

The most recent filings on the record

Collected from Prince William County data center project registry. A planning record proves that a project was filed and states the stage the county believes it has reached. It does not prove that construction has started, except on the rows that say so, and it never proves that space is available. and no public filing anywhere discloses what is contractible at a named building. That answer comes from an operator call, which is the part we do by hand. See how we verify capacity.

Our own record is behind the courts here, and you should know where

The registry above still carries Digital Gateway North and Digital Gateway South with a status of Pending, filed 13 December 2023. Both entries are real, and the county has not retired them. Neither project exists any more: the rezonings behind them were voided in August 2025, affirmed void in March 2026, and abandoned by the last developer standing in July 2026.

The largest campus figure in the table above comes from the same place. It is 11,555,200 square feet of proposed gross floor area on Compass's rezoning case, on 884 acres at Gainesville, and the county's own record shows every square foot of it as unbuilt. That case was part of the Digital Gateway and is void. It is the largest number on this page and it is worth nothing to a tenant.

We are leaving those rows in the count rather than quietly deleting them, and saying this instead. The collection is a mirror of what the county publishes, and editing it to match the news would make it something else, something a reader could no longer check against the source. But a Pending status in that registry is not evidence that a project is live, and on the two largest entries in the set it is now known to be wrong. Anywhere else in this county, treat a Pending row as a record that a project was filed, and confirm its current standing with the county before it informs a decision.

The same registry also shows the other side of that story. QTS walked away from the Digital Gateway, and in the same county its Manassas DC4 and DC6 are recorded as under construction. A developer withdrawing from one site is not a developer leaving the market.

Where the market actually is

Power, and the part that is genuinely different

Most of the county is served by Dominion Energy, and the Northern Virginia queue conversation applies here exactly as it does in Loudoun: large new service is scheduled rather than bought, and the schedule is the constraint. Ask whether the capacity you are being offered is energised at the building today or contingent on an upgrade, and get the date in writing.

The city of Manassas is the exception worth knowing about. It runs its own municipal electric utility, so a building inside the city limits may sit behind a different provider, a different rate structure and a different interconnection queue from a building a few miles away in the county. That is not automatically better or worse, and it is a question with a real answer: ask which utility serves the specific building, and ask for the rate schedule it is served under.

Water is the other local question. The western half of the county has drawn sustained opposition on environmental grounds, and cooling design is part of why. An operator that can describe its water usage and whether the plant is closed loop has an easier conversation in this county than one that cannot.

When Prince William is right, and when it is the wrong choice

It is right when you want Northern Virginia network access and Northern Virginia latency without paying Ashburn's premium for the address, and when your requirement fits in existing Manassas stock. The buildings there are connected, they are entitled, and they are standing. For a requirement in the hundreds of kilowatts to a few megawatts, this is a genuinely good answer and it is frequently overlooked because the county's headlines have been about projects that never got built.

It is right, too, when a diverse second site inside the same region is the goal. A Manassas building is a different campus, a different substation and in some cases a different utility from an Ashburn one, while staying close enough to manage with the same staff.

It is the wrong choice if you need a large block of new capacity on a fixed date. The county's recent record on large new development is two of the biggest proposals in the country dying inside a week, and nothing about that process has been reformed since. A requirement that depends on new construction being entitled and delivered here on schedule is taking a risk that Loudoun, Richmond or a market outside Virginia would not ask you to take.

It is also the wrong choice if you are shopping on announced megawatts. The two live announced projects on this page total 636 MW, and neither is leasable today. The dead ones were far larger and are worth nothing at all. In this county more than any other on this site, the announced column and the available column have almost no relationship to each other.