NIMBY activists have suffered a series of recent defeats trying to stop Northern Virginia's data center sprawl from encroaching into rural areas of Prince William County, their arguments rejected by a majority on the county's Board of Supervisors.

But that may be about to change—because these grass-roots protestors have managed to change the composition of the county board itself.

Last year, the NIMBY crowd circled their wagons around Manassas—site of the Civil War battlefield at Bull Run—trying to stop a 2,139-acre, 28M SF data center campus from being built. In November, at the end of a contentious 14-hour board meeting, the Supervisors voted 5-2 to approve the project, known as the Prince William Digital Gateway.