CyrusOne Grabs Major Data Center in Chicago

By Barbra Murray, Contributing Editor

Gary Wojtaszek, CyrusOne

Chicago—CyrusOne Inc. has bolstered its presence in one of the leading data center hubs in the country with the acquisition of a 428,000-square-foot property in Aurora, Ill., just outside Chicago. The global data center solutions provider acquired 2905 Diehl Road for $130 million, taking it off the hands of CME Group in a sale-leaseback transaction.

CyrusOne will have a long-term relationship with CME, which has entered into a 15-year lease agreement for space at 2905 Diehl. “With this facility, and with CME Group as our tenant, we are excited to have the opportunity to expand the global risk management campus in Chicago—the preeminent financial services co-location hub in the industry—which will be a cornerstone of our unique and rapidly growing data center platform,” Gary Wojtaszek, president & CEO of CyrusOne, said in a prepared statement.

The data center REIT may very well be closing other lease transactions in Aurora in the near future, as it is acquiring 36,000 leasable collocation square feet and a 15-acre parcel of land adjacent to the data center.

Filling up the additional space shouldn’t be too much of a challenge for CyrusOne; Metropolitan Chicago recorded positive net absorption totaling 32.5 megawatts of wholesale inventory in 2015, according to a report by commercial real estate services firm JLL. The numbers will continue on an upswing in 2016, with JLL forecasting an increase in absorption to 35.5 MWs.

And should CyrusOne decide to build a data center on the land across from 2905 Diehl, the facility would be unlikely to collect cobwebs, as Chicago ranks 11th on the list of the top global financial markets, and it’s even higher up on the list in the U.S., holding the fourth spot, according to commercial think tank Z/Yen Group’s latest Global Financial Centres Index.

It’s very much about finance in the Chicago data center market. Per the JLL report, “Financial firms are dependent on transactions that occur within nanoseconds—latency of even a few milliseconds as data travels to a far-away server can mean a major loss in revenue. Because of this need, markets like Northern New Jersey, Northern Virginia, Toronto and Greater Chicago will maintain their status as elite data center locations.”