Data Center Cluster Grows in Elk Grove Village, IL

Elk Grove Village, IL the Chicago suburb which in the last century was the heart of the nation’s metalworking industry, has established itself in this century as a leader in the red-hot data center sector. 

A dozen major data center facilities now are clustered in Elk Grove Village, soon to be joined by a $1B, 750K SF campus that will be built by San Francisco-based Prime Data Centers Corp.

Elk Grove Village has purchased approximately 24 acres of property—including offices, a retail building, a hotel and a concrete recycler—that it will sell to Prime Data Centers as the site for its new data center campus.

The town acquired the last piece of the land-acquisition puzzle last week with its $16.5M purchase of the 5-acre site occupied in the Midway Court area by Vulcan Construction Materials, the concrete producer.

According to a report in the Daily Herald newspaper, the Village has been pursuing the parcel for the past year, at one point threatening to invoke eminent domain to seize the land for development. 

Village officials told the herald the acquisition would allow the ComEd utility to install a power substation on the parcel, which is critical to the data center campus project. The Village also is creating a new tax-increment financing district for the Midway Court neighborhood to help pay for environmental remediation of the Vulcan site, which contains underground petroleum fuel storage tanks that must be removed before the Prime data center campus is built.

Prime’s campus will include three 3-story buildings housing server farms totaling more than 750K SF with the capacity for about 150 megawatts of net absorption capacity.

The new data center campus will be nearly twice the size of a data center Microsoft is building at the nearby Elk Grove Technology Park. Microsoft’s plans include three data center buildings with a total of 400K SF. The Tech Park, in proximity to Chicago’s O’Hare Airport, is owned by Brennan Investment Group, with CBRE as the exclusive selling agent.

Village officials told the Herald they expect Prime’s data center campus to become a driver for economic development in the area. The campus will generate an estimated $4M annually in property and utility taxes.

Data center player Digital Realty operates a data center campus consisting of three buildings totaling more than 1.1M SF in Elk Grove Village. The campus offers data center services to the Chicagoland metro, has multiple carriers on site and offers the ability to connect directly to all major cloud providers.