Our note on Thursday titled "World's Largest Data Center Project On Verge Of Collapse After Blackstone Unexpectedly Pulls Out" detailed Blackstone dialing back its presence from Northern Virginia's data-center alley, raising questions about whether the AI infrastructure buildout, colliding with local resistance movements, has begun to hit hard limits.
Just days after agreeing to sell stakes in three Virginia data centers to Digital Realty Trust for $3.5 billion, Blackstone's QTS Realty Trust is reportedly abandoning plans for its portion of the massive Prince William Digital Gateway project. The 2,100-acre campus was expected to include as many as 37 data-center buildings and require city-scale power supplies.
"For community organizers and residents that spent the last five years opposing the Digital Gateway, QTS's pullout will now validate a playbook that involved pressure campaigns on local politicians and legal attacks. It will also unleash even more powerful blowback nationwide against these unwanted developments," we noted.
That brings us to the composition of the local resistance. Multiple reports suggest data center opposition is not entirely organic.
In fact, one familiar player appears to be involved, a name our readers know well, and the U.S. government certainly recognizes because a China-based billionaire funds the socialist NGO network.
Y Combinator founder Garry Tan, also founder of Garry's List, a civic engagement organization, cited the Bitcoin Policy Institute's recent report on how a "coordinated foreign influence campaign against American AI — running through CCP state media, a Shanghai-based Marxist's nonprofit network, and foreig
