http://www.chicagobusiness.com/reale...-ohare-airport
Two more data centers planned near O'Hare
By Danny Ecker
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A pair of data center operators are adding to the list of companies building such facilities near O'Hare International Airport.
A venture of Reno, Nev.-based RagingWire Data Centers bought a 19-acre site next to the Hamilton Lakes Business Park in Itasca, where it plans to begin work this spring on a roughly 200,000-square-foot data center, according to Pat McKillen, an executive with Hamilton Partners, the seller. The center could be expanded in the future to as large as 550,000 square feet, McKillen said.
In the other new addition, Dallas-based Stream Data Centers said it is set to open a 130,600-square-foot data center this year at 2080 Lunt Ave. in Elk Grove Village. The facility, Stream's first foray into the Chicago market, sits on nearly 6 acres just west of O'Hare.
The deals highlight the growing demand for data center facilities triggered by companies' and consumers' expanded use of services such as streaming and cloud storage. That has led many big tech firms to need more room to store data on off-site servers.
Chicago has become one of the top data center destinations nationwide because of its central location, competitive electricity prices relative to other big markets and robust fiberconnectivity that exists thanks in part to data-hungry financial and trading firms in the area, said Sean Reynolds, regional director at real estate firm Jones Lang LaSalle who co-leads the company's Midwest data center practice.
While the city is home to one of the world's largest data centers—the 1.1 million-square-foot facility at 350 E. Cermak Road near McCormick Place—the area near O'Hare that includes Elk Grove Village, Franklin Park and Itasca has become "Main and Main" for the local data center market, Reynolds said, thanks to big additions there from industry giants like San Francisco-based Digital Realty Trust and DuPont Fabros Technology, which Digital Realty acquired last year.
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