Green Energy Center data center, Rushmere, Virginia

The Surry Green Energy Center, a data center and hydrogen campus that Green Energy Partners plans in Rushmere, next to Dominion Energy's Surry nuclear power plant off Hog Island Road in Surry County, Virginia, won its rezoning in 2024, but its developer went through Chapter 11 bankruptcy the same year. The company billed it as a first-in-the-nation data center and hydrogen fuel hub eventually powered by small modular nuclear reactors built on site.

Surry County supervisors voted 3-2 on February 8, 2024 to rezone the land for 19 data centers on a 3 million-square-foot campus, with Supervisors Amy Drewry and Timothy Calhoun voting no after Drewry's motion to delay failed. The company's attorney, Greg Davis, described a $6.45 billion investment over a 13-year buildout that would by 2036 bring more than 1,300 permanent jobs and, by the company's analysis, $74 million a year in tax revenue.

The data centers would first draw on existing grid power, with revenue paying for four to six small modular reactors, mini nuclear plants not likely to run for 10 to 15 years. The developer formed a joint venture with IP3 to develop the site.

Opponents at the 2024 hearing questioned the reactors. "This is not a technology that's available as I stand here tonight," Davis himself said of them, putting them seven or 10 years away. Mike Eggleston, one of eight speakers against the project, called them an "unproven technology," and Daniel Shaye called the plan an "invasion by corporate interests" that "our rural, quiet, peaceful way of life will not withstand."

A traffic study in the application projected daily weekday trips on the road would rise 93% to over 3,600, and Drewry called the company's proffers, including $950,000 of improvements to Hog Island Road, "vague."

Court records show Green Energy Partners LLC filed for Chapter 11 in September 2024, listing more than $3 million in unsecured claims, and in February 2025 a bankruptcy judge approved assigning its $12 million contract to buy the land to a new company, Surry Green Energy Center LLC. Davis said it was "a reorganization, not a liquidation of Green Energy Partners, which is alive and well and continuing work on the Surry Green Energy Center."

Drewry was not surprised: "I voted against the project because the proffers were not legally stringent enough to protect the citizens and county." To settle a lawsuit from neighboring landowner Cobham Bay Farms, the company had also agreed to buy another 248 acres across Hog Island Road if that land is rezoned.

Surry County's economic development office said that "from a zoning standpoint, this private project may proceed." Any rezoning of the extra Cobham Bay acreage would go back to the Surry County Board of Supervisors, whose members in March 2025 were Chairman Robert Elliott, Vice Chairman Breyon Pierce, Tim Calhoun, Walter Hardy and Amy Drewry; no such application had been filed as of that report.