Coalition to Protect Prince William County

The Coalition to Protect Prince William County (CPPWC) is a Northern-Virginia civic coalition led by Executive Director Elena Schlossberg and based in Haymarket, Virginia, working to slow and stop hyperscale data-centre development in the Loudoun / Prince William corridor — the world's largest data-centre cluster and a corridor that carries on the order of 70% of global Internet traffic transit. The Coalition's signature multi-year fight has been against the Prince William Digital Gateway, the 22-million-square-foot / 2,139-acre / 37-data-centre campus proposed adjacent to the Manassas National Battlefield Park; on 31 March 2026 the Virginia Court of Appeals upheld a circuit court ruling invalidating the County's rezoning approval, and on 15 April 2026 the Prince William Board of County Supervisors voted unanimously to stop defending the project after spending $1.72 million on legal fees.

Prince William Digital Gateway campaign

The Coalition's organising work on the Digital Gateway began with an April 2022 citizens town hall mobilising initial opposition to the project — at the time of its proposal, the largest single proposed data-centre campus globally — sited on rezoned rural land directly adjacent to the Manassas National Battlefield Park. The Coalition's tactics have run along four lines.

• Public-meeting mobilisation against the rezoning vote. The Coalition organised community attendance at the December 2023 Prince William Board of County Supervisors meeting on the project's rezoning application — a session that ran 27 hours and ended in a narrow approval of the rezoning. The Coalition's framing of the procedural failures in that approval became the evidentiary base for the subsequent litigation.
• Strategic litigation. In January 2024 the Coalition and aligned petitioners filed suit challenging the December 2023 rezoning; in August 2025 a circuit court found insufficient public notice had been given before the rezoning and halted construction; on 31 March 2026 the Virginia Court of Appeals upheld the circuit-court ruling, with a separate ruling clearing the way for trial on environmental concerns affecting the Civil War battlefield grounds. Schlossberg's standing framing on the rule-of-law argument — "There's something called the rule of law. You don't get to argue because you might lose some economic benefit that you set aside the rule of law" — supplied the Coalition's headline message during the litigation.
• Pressure on the County Board to drop the defence. Following the Court of Appeals ruling, the Coalition convened a 7 April 2026 press conference at the McCoart Building in Woodbridge, Virginia calling for the Board's immediate withdrawal from defending the project. Schlossberg framed the moment as a "time for PWC elected leaders to turn a page on the folly of the Digital Gateway"; co-speakers included Vida Carroll of the Civic Association of Brentsville and Surrounding Areas and Ashley Studholme, Executive Director of the Prince William Conservation Alliance. On 15 April 2026 the Board voted unanimously after a closed-door session to stop defending the rezoning, with the Coalition framing the vote as residents and the Board "stepping through the door that we worked so hard to open." Developers QTS and Compass Datacenters (a Blackstone portfolio company) subsequently filed an 11th-hour appeal to the Supreme Court of Virginia on 1 May 2026.
• Coalition-building across the Northern-Virginia opposition ecology. The Coalition's lateral relationships run across local civic and conservation organisations — the Prince William Conservation Alliance, the Civic Association of Brentsville and Surrounding Areas, the Oak Valley Homeowners Association, and the American Battlefield Trust — anchoring opposition in a register that engages historic-preservation, rural-land-use, and conservation audiences alongside the climate and energy critique of hyperscale AI infrastructure.

Other programmes

The Digital Gateway is the lead fight but not the only one. The Coalition's standing portfolio also covers a Data Centers Initiative tracking proposals across the county (the Coalition records on the order of 86.9 million square feet of potential data-centre development as the at-stake figure), opposition to 765 kV transmission-line expansion routes driven by data-centre demand, and a Rural Crescent preservation programme protecting the county's rural-land-use character from urbanisation. The Coalition's public-facing apparatus — email-alert campaigns, town halls, road signs and flyers, and dedicated press and signs channels — is structured around sustained engagement of long-term Prince William County residents rather than around a single-issue mobilisation.

Place in the movement

The Coalition to Protect Prince William County is the corpus's first Northern-Virginia / Data-Center-Alley local-group, the corpus's first civic-coalition local-group anchored on the structurally largest US data-centre cluster (the Northern Virginia / Loudoun / Prince William corridor hosts roughly 70% of global Internet traffic transit), and the corpus's first local-group whose hyperscale-data-centre fight has produced a final-instance state-appellate-court ruling halting a proposed project. The non-AI-audience-engagement vector the Coalition anchors — historic-preservation and rural-land-use audiences engaged in AI-infrastructure decisions through Manassas National Battlefield Park adjacency — is structurally distinct from the existing US data-centre opposition local-groups' engagement vectors: Memphis Community Against Pollution and Tigers Against Pollution anchor the Black-led / environmental-justice / Boxtown register on the xAI Colossus fight; Panhandle 1st Coalition anchors the rural West Texas / water-and-air / Ogallala-Aquifer register on the Project Matador fight. CPPWC anchors a fourth register — a civic coalition engaging the Board of Supervisors directly, anchored on procedural rule-of-law and historic-preservation grounds in a longer-running American conservation tradition — and is the corpus's clearest US case-study of grassroots civic-coalition organising halting hyperscale-AI infrastructure through strategic litigation rather than environmental-justice or rural-water community organising.

The Coalition's organising form is also structurally distinct from the corpus's US AI-safety / Pause chapters (lg-pauseai-bay-area, lg-pauseai-nyc) and the US youth / Encode Justice student-chapter network (lg-encode-justice-georgia, lg-encode-justice-north-carolina) — CPPWC is locally-rooted, concentrated on the physical-infrastructure layer of frontier AI compute as that infrastructure is sited inside the world's largest data-centre cluster, and engaged with the make-AI-good landscape through a property-rights / conservation / procedural-law register rather than through any AI-safety, AI-policy, or AI-ethics framing. The Coalition's emergence in 2022 around the Digital Gateway proposal and its multi-year build-up to the March–April 2026 appellate-and-Board double-win illustrate the on-ramp pattern the corpus is mapping in the US data-centre fight: a long-running civic coalition in a county with no prior AI-policy organising track record, inducted into the make-AI-good landscape through the physical-infrastructure layer of frontier AI compute as that infrastructure is sited inside an already-burdened corridor of national historic and rural-land-use significance.