‘We’ll Go To Another Spot’

Compass Datacenters CEO Chris Crosby says he is done dealing with communities that don’t want data centers. 

Bisnow/Jon Banister

Compass Datacenters CEO Chris Crosby and Loudoun County Economic Development’s Buddy Rizer speak May 13 at DICE National at the Bethesda North Marriott Hotel and Conference Center.

The Brookfield-backed development firm last month walked away from what would have been one of the world’s largest data center clusters in Prince William County, Virginia, after spending $40M pursuing the project, Crosby said.

The rezoning was struck down on a “technicality,” he noted — the case revolved around notice requirements for public meetings. But the process revealed that the county didn’t want the massive data center campus.

“And so, OK, like great, that’s not something that you want to do, we’ll walk away from our $40M we invested,” Crosby said Wednesday morning at Bisnow‘s national Data Center Investment Conference and Expo. “We’ll walk away, and now that community doesn’t get $15B in investment. That’s OK, they don’t want it.”

Compass’ decision came after the Virginia Court of Appeals on March 31 struck down a rezoning that would have allowed it and Blackstone’s QTS to build digital infrastructure facilities on more than 2,000 acres near the historic Manassas National Battlefield Park. 

The county said April 15 it would drop its defense of the rezoning, rather than appeal to the state’s highest court. The developers then had until the end of the month to decide whether they would pursue their own appeals to keep the fight going. 

Compass Datacenters, which had planned an 11.6M SF project within the PW Digital Gateway district, said April 29 it wouldn’t appeal. 

QTS, which plans to build another 11M SF of data centers on a separate portion of the district, said hours before the filing deadline it would appeal the ruling to the Virginia Supreme Court. 

But it will be on its own. Crosby, who founded Compass in 2011, said this week it is shifting its efforts away from Prince William County. 

The lawsuit against PW Digital Gateway was brought by preservation groups opposed to building data centers near the historic battlefield, and the fight became an issue in local elections — data center opponents replaced lawmakers on the county board who had supported the industry. 

Crosby noted that the county’s initial decision to allow data centers on the land came because Dominion Energy had built a high-voltage line across it that depressed residential property values. He said the landowners who agreed to sell to Compass wanted the development to proceed.

But ultimately, Crosby decided to back away from the effort. 

“We’re not going to fight those battles,” he said. “We’ll just leave. We’ll go to another spot, because the United States is big enough, capital can still flow to places that want you to be their neighbor.”

Crosby said 75% of his day-to-day job now involves politics and policy, whereas that used to be around 15%.

He puts some of the blame on the data center industry itself for causing this political opposition. Seven in 10 Americans oppose data centers being built in their community, according to a Gallup poll released Wednesday.

Some of that is due to speculators and inexperienced data center developers that have given the industry a bad reputation, Crosby said, while adding that leaders across the industry haven’t done a good enough job of selling the benefits of data centers to communities. 

“To be frank, we suck at talking about our industry,” he said.