Virginia Tech is set to break ground Sept. 14 on the first building for its $1 billion Innovation Campus in Alexandria. National Geographic Society Chairman Jean Case, wife of AOL co-founder Steve Case, will be the keynote speaker at the groundbreaking ceremony.

A graduate school for computer science and computer engineering students, the Innovation Campus is a major component in the state’s Tech Talent Investment Program, which aims to produce 31,000 in-demand computer science graduates during the next two decades.

Scheduled for an August 2024 opening, the campus’s $302 million Academic Building 1 was designed by SmithGroup and is being developed by Bethesda, Maryland-based JBG Smith Properties. (The state is funding $168 million of the building’s construction, with the remainder coming from Virginia Tech and private donors.)

“It’s a place in which the future of technology will be invented,” Lance Collins, vice president and executive director of the Innovation Campus, says of the 11-story, 300,000-square-foot building.