MANASSAS, Virginia — The fight over data centers has come to a literal battlefield.
Manassas National Battlefield Park is next to a property that could soon hold the nation’s largest data center cluster — a sprawling 37-building supercomputing complex. The Prince William County Board of Supervisors approved the Digital Gateway project in 2023 after a 27-hour hearing.
Legal challenges followed. The Virginia Court of Appeals heard arguments in the case Tuesday.
The project is likely the most striking example of a debate happening across the country as communities grapple with the data center boom bringing industrial sites into residential and rural areas, while straining an electric grid struggling to keep up with the surge. In a poll conducted by POLITICO last month, just 37 percent of respondents said they would support building data centers within 3 miles of their home — compared to 53 percent who would support a highway.
This project takes that question to the extreme: Proposed jointly by QTS and Compass, Digital Gateway will be the biggest data center complex in the nation, accompanied by 14 electric substations and hundreds of diesel generators. It will abut a corner of the national park where a pivotal Civil War battle was fought in 1862 and disrupt a former Confederate camping ground where hundreds of soldiers who died of measles are likely buried, as well as the site of a historic settlement of freed African American former slaves. When it was approved, it was opposed by the local historic and planning commission, as well as park superintendents.
“Everyone in the nation needs to be concerned about this because if it can happen here, there is nothing stopping it from happening anywhere you love or may think is off-limits,” said Kathy Kuilick, who sat on the Prince William County Historical Commission when it recommended that local officials block the project. “If this can happen here, what’s to stop data centers like this happening outside the gates of Gettysburg or the entrance to Yellowstone?”
QTS and Compass declined to comment. Neither company has released information about how much power the complex will require, but environmental groups have calculated that it would need more than 2.9 gigawatts of electricity to operate — enough energy to power 717,000 homes at peak load.
That could place significant strain on the grid at a time when both political parties are jockeying to combat data centers’ impacts on electricity rates for everyday Americans. At his State of the Union address last night, President Donald Trump announced new agreements with the technology industry to ensure that data centers cover their power costs. In the Democrats’ rebuttal, Virginia Gov. Abigail Spanberger accused Trump’s policies of “driving up costs in energy.”
But the national debate over data centers’ energy needs does little to address questions about where they should be sited. Digital Gateway’s would-be neighbors and historical experts say the answer is not next to Civil War battlefields.
Preserving history
The Manassas National Battlefield Park site was home to two Civil War clashes.
In 1861, the Battle of First Manassas was the first full-scale battle of the Civil War, and at the time was the largest battle in the history of the Western Hemisphere. A little more than a year later, the armies clashed there again in the Battle of Second Manassas. The Confederate victory there is largely considered to have emboldened Gen. Robert E. Lee to continue marching northward in a campaign that would end at Gettysburg, the turning point of the Civil War.
That second battle began at Brawner Farm, on the western edge of what is now the national park. David Duncan, president of the American Battlefield Trust, a nonprofit dedicated to preserving historic sites and a plaintiff in one of two lawsuits against the project, said park visitors’ experience will be seriously diminished if the data centers are allowed to be built near that location.
“People who visit battlefields, they want to have an authentic experience, they want to go there and see what the soldiers saw and to use their imagination for what thousands of men marching and fighting would look like,” he said. “To have 100-foot-tall buildings with around-the-clock noise and lighting right there, it takes away from that authentic power of place.”
This is not the first time lands around the national park have been threatened by development. In the late 1980s, Congress added land to the national park that was otherwise set to be part of a new shopping mall complex. In the 1990s, the Walt Disney Co. planned an American history-themed park 3 miles from the battlefield. That idea was nixed after local and national outcry.
The data center proposal has similarly sparked outrage — including from two battlefield park superintendents.
In 2021, then-Superintendent Brandon Bies called the project “the single greatest threat to Manassas National Battlefield Park in nearly three decades” in a letter to the county Board of Supervisors.
His successor, Kristofer Butcher, also wrote letters to the board in 2023 specifically expressing concerns that Digital Gateway would encompass an area known as Camp Hardee, where hundreds of Confederate soldiers died of a measles outbreak in the winter of 1861. Those soldiers are presumed to be buried on those lands, though no specific graves have been identified.
“It is clear that these soldiers were buried within the vicinity of the Pageland farm,” he wrote. “There are likely hundreds of soldiers’ graves within the project area or its immediate environs.”
The Board of Supervisors approved the project over those objections in December 2023.
Legal battles
A dozen residents whose homes abut the project, as well as the American Battlefield Trust, which also owns land abutting it, filed two lawsuits shortly after. The lawsuits accuse the county of ignoring the project’s impact on historic sites, and also of violating state and county laws about how to advertise public hearings for land use decisions.
The Virginia Court of Appeals heard arguments Tuesday on the second question. When Prince William County first tried to run an advertisement in The Washington Post publicizing the public hearing, the county clerk did not respond to an email requesting confirmation of a proof and quote for running the advertisement, so the newspaper didn’t run the advertisement. The ad was run a few days later, after the county corrected the issue.
Plaintiffs say that delay ran afoul of requirements for how far in advance public hearings must be advertised and that the county should have delayed the hearing to comply with the law and ensure residents could weigh in on the venture. Project developers, arguing in court on behalf of themselves and the country, say no harm was done because so many residents attended the hearing that it lasted 27 hours in order to accommodate everyone who wished to speak.
A circuit court judge ruled in favor of one set of plaintiffs in August, which the county and developers are now appealing. Plaintiffs of a second lawsuit that was dismissed over standing also argued separately that their suit should be reinstated.
“The purpose of providing notice is so the public has knowledge of the hearing,” attorney Matthew Westover, representing Compass, told three appeals court judges Tuesday. He added that residents attending a public hearing proves “you got all the notice you are entitled to.”
The plaintiffs have also accused the county of rushing to approve the Digital Gateway project before new members of the Board of Supervisors were sworn in January 2024.
The project was highly controversial during the two years it was being considered by various county boards and commissions, and in December 2023 when the board approved the project, multiple members had been voted out in favor of candidates who ran against data centers.
Chap Petersen, an attorney representing the American Battlefield Trust, told the appeals court his group alleges that the Board of Supervisors decided to hold the hearing despite being aware that its public advertisement was published late because it was unclear whether the project could win approval once new members were sworn in.
“Nobody has a right to be heard by a certain set of board of supervisors,” he told the judges.
County revenue at issue
Then-Supervisor Chair Ann Wheeler said it is only natural that she and her other board members wanted to finish a project they had worked on for two years before approving it.
“The whole advertisement issue wasn’t a big deal, but it was just the biggest deal that they could find that stuck in the lawsuit,” she said in an interview Wednesday. “It wasn’t like we were hiding the hearing, it was one of the most well-attended hearings in our history.”
Wheeler dismissed concerns that the Digital Gateway will change the landscape of the battlefield or the experience for visitors to the national park, saying the opponents would also oppose housing developments or commercial ventures.
Data centers, she said, brought significant tax revenue to the county at a time when it was struggling following the Covid-19 shutdowns.
The Digital Gateway project alone is expected to bring some $400 million in annual revenue to the county.
“Not to consider it would be irresponsible governing,” Wheeler said, adding that she thinks “in many ways, data centers are more benign than housing.”
Wheeler said project opponents have been the victim of “fearmongering” from people who do not want any more data centers anywhere.
That’s not so for Liam Burke, a plaintiff in the lawsuit. His land abuts the Digital Gateway development, and he’s concerned about how noise from the data centers will affect the donkeys he keeps, as well as the horses and donkeys his wife regularly treats as part of her veterinary clinic.
“It could be devastating for us, our equines, they don’t like noise, they don’t like lights, so the impact on us and our quality of life could be horrible.”
