The Prince William County Board of Supervisors voted 8-0 Tuesday to slash the geographic area where data centers can be built without special approval, cutting the county’s by-right overlay district from 9,698 acres to 3,654 acres, a 62% reduction. The zoning text amendment, approved after a hearing that ran more than three hours, means developers in roughly 6,000 newly excluded acres will now need a special use permit rather than being able to build by right. Supervisors voted 5-3 to preserve a 90-day grace period for developers to file applications before the new rules take effect, rejecting a separate motion to eliminate that window entirely. “We’ve got varied perspectives across the community as it relates to what we’re doing,” Brentsville District Supervisor Tom Gordy said before the vote. “But the one thing that everyone is unified on is we must get this done. We need to end by right development of data centers in Prince William County.” Board Chair Deshundra Jefferson pushed for an immediate decision: “It doesn’t mean there will never be another data center application ever again,” she said of the vote, calling the 90-day compromise imperfect but necessary to reach consensus.
The vote follows two recent, high-profile local flashpoints. In July, Blackstone’s QTS abandoned its planned $100 billion Digital Gateway data center project, which would have spanned 2,100 acres in the county, after dropping its legal effort to reinstate rezoning approvals the county had withdrawn. Days later, the Board of Supervisors separately voted down a land use designation for the proposed 1,940-acre Dulles South Innovation Center. Prince William currently has 36 operational data centers and another 40 in its development pipeline, 11 already under construction, according to US Data Center Map, with reported and operational power usage from those facilities totaling 4.5 gigawatts.
What makes this vote worth mapping against the rest of Virginia’s regulatory landscape is how independently it appears to have happened. Prince William sits directly next to Loudoun County, still the world’s densest concentration of data centers, which eliminated by-right data center development entirely back in March 2025. Loudoun took a further, separate step just last week, voting to advance a pause on new data center applications for up to 12 months while it completes a second phase of its own data center standards, and is separately weighing whether to strip legacy by-right status from applications filed before its March 2025 cutoff. Prince William’s vote this week didn’t eliminate by-right development outright the way Loudoun did, and it isn’t a temporary pause either; it’s a geographic redrawing of where by-right rules still apply at all, a different regulatory tool aimed at a similar underlying goal, decided through the county’s own separate planning process rather than in coordination with its neighbor…