Wilderness Crossing data center, Locust Grove, Virginia

Wilderness Crossing is a 2,600-acre development planned for homes, data centers and warehouses near the intersection of Routes 3 and 20 in Locust Grove, Orange County, Virginia, beside the Wilderness Battlefield. Orange County supervisors approved the rezoning for developer KEG Associates III in April 2023, and a lawsuit by preservation groups and neighbors to void it has kept the project in circuit court since 2023. No trial date has been set, and Amazon Web Services is named as the project's tenant.

The approved plan allows up to 5,000 homes and 732 acres of industrial use, built out in phases over about 40 years, with the industrial portion including what the Culpeper Star-Exponent describes as Amazon data centers. A Virginia Freedom of Information Act lawsuit by the Piedmont Environmental Council found that 10 local officials had signed nondisclosure agreements for "the benefit of Amazon.com, Inc. and its affiliates."

No official power figure has been published; Blackridge Research, a market research firm, estimates the campus at 1,500 megawatts of power and up to 21 million square feet of data center space at full build-out. Chris Miller, president of the Piedmont Environmental Council, has questioned where the water would come from, saying, "We will need two more generation plants in Orange County."

The Board of Supervisors voted 4-1 on April 25, 2023 to approve the rezoning, the largest in county history according to the council, after 37 people spoke against it, mostly about water supply and traffic. The lawsuit says changes made the night of the public hearing raised cash proffers from $6 million to as much as $24 million and removed a cap that had limited data centers and warehouses to 5 million square feet, expanding it to more than 30 million.

The plaintiffs, the American Battlefield Trust, Friends of Wilderness Battlefield, the Central Virginia Battlefields Trust and neighbors Mark and Cheryl Nowacki and Robert J. Foster, say the property abuts the battlefield where more than 160,000 Union and Confederate soldiers fought in May 1864 and that the project would add more than 60,000 daily vehicle trips to nearby roads. "You can move a development, you can move a data center, we can't move where this country's history happened," said David Duncan, president of the American Battlefield Trust.

Orange County has since removed data centers as a by-right use in its industrial zoning district, and the Town of Orange now requires a special use permit for them.

In September 2025, Judge David B. Franzén dismissed three of the plaintiffs' seven claims and let four proceed, over how the rezoning process, hearings and taxation were handled. At a March 27, 2026 hearing, Franzén declined to rule on a request by the county and the developers to send the case to the Virginia Court of Appeals before a trial, saying he would rule only after that appeals court acted on appeals the county had already filed there; the Court of Appeals had not yet acted.

Mike Brady, the plaintiffs' lead attorney, has said the case is going to trial and will be decided on the legislative record; as of that April 2026 update, no trial date had been published.