Virginia's 3,000-Megawatt Berry Hill Campus Will Make Most of Its Own Power

Stack Infrastructure has filed joint construction and environmental permit applications for Project Crossroads, a 21-building data center campus at the Southern Virginia Megasite at Berry Hill in Pittsylvania County. The filings went to the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, and a project summary prepared for DEQ is dated October 8. They put a number on the campus for the first time: about 3,000 megawatts of capacity at full build-out, most of it generated on site.

The scale was set by agreements already signed. In March the Danville-Pittsylvania Regional Industrial Facility Authority approved the sale of 2,990 of the megasite's 3,528 acres to SAC III Acquisition for about $737.8 million, with a first phase of at least 1,000 acres closing by June 2027 and the last by June 2031. The purchase agreement sets performance terms of 2,050 jobs at an average annual wage of $80,500 and an investment of no more than $73.5 billion over 30 years. Stack has described roughly $100 billion over three decades. The campus and its supporting infrastructure occupy about 1,715 developable acres, with 1,733 acres disturbed during construction.

The electrical scope is spelled out in the filings. The site today has one substation with a 30 megavolt-ampere transformer and 138-kilovolt transmission lines. The permit materials call for a new 150-megawatt substation operational by the end of the second quarter of 2028, plus two dedicated generation campuses, 80 acres in the southwest and 125 acres in the northeast, 205 acres together and described as the minimum area needed to meet the load. Generation leans on natural gas delivered by existing pipelines. The equipment mix is still open and may include diesel generators, gas-fired generators, battery energy storage, or a combination.

That makes it two builds at once. Twenty-one data halls phased over 15 years is conventional hyperscale work: medium-voltage distribution, switchgear, busway, uninterruptible power supplies, and the commissioning that follows each room. The generation campuses add paralleling gear, step-up transformers, protective relaying, and battery storage interconnection, which is power plant work rather than building work. Construction tied to the permit is expected to begin in the third quarter of 2027, and the authority voted October 16 to let Stack grade about 400 acres before closing, for $250,000.

The county has no standing data center workforce to draw on. The megasite's only other announced tenant is Microporous, a $1.35 billion battery separator plant announced in 2024, and more than $217 million in public and private money has gone into the site since Danville and Pittsylvania bought it in 2008. Pittsylvania expects up to $48 million a year in property tax at full build-out, roughly $16.5 million on the first 1,000 acres and $16,250 for each developed acre beyond that, plus $1.62 per $100 of assessed value on equipment. It is granting no local discretionary cash incentives.

One condition still governs the whole thing. Appalachian Power has to confirm it can deliver a minimum load capacity of 299 megawatts by the end of 2028, or the buyer can walk away.