Chicago has enjoyed fantastic success as a home for data centers in recent years. The 2020 roll-out of Illinois state-level incentives draws continued growth as the city closes in on 700 megawatts of operational colocation capacity. With extremely robust fiber, a dense urban population, plenty of local business opportunities, and an array of key cloud services available for access, Chicago is the star of the Midwest.
Chicago has the third-largest population in the United States and concurrently the third-largest gross metropolitan product, with a sophisticated economy centered on the financial industry and encompassing local bourses such as the Chicago Stock Exchange and Chicago Mercantile Exchange. The Mercantile Exchange serves as the largest derivatives market globally, pioneering various futures products and associated analytics that led to many surrounding businesses. These provided an initial core of technically savvy clientele with distinct low-latency compute needs. A variety of additional global firms call the city home and require their own IT environments, spanning engineering, medical tech, transportation, application development, and a host of other fields.
Transformation for the Digital Age
To support these varying requirements, Chicago has developed a rich data center ecosystem that has continued to scale to a top-three national market. Downtown Chicago boasts over two dozen local and regional fiber networks, offering plentiful peering opportunities and linking the city to every major US and Canadian market. Thanks to this 
fiber density, out-of-town stock exchanges have piloted trading programs in Chicago, with the New York Stock Exchange experimenting with local deployments for backup and more. Local utility ComEd has responded positively to the data center industry, with the power constrictions so prevalent in other major cities nonexistent to date in Chicago. Power availability has created a multifaceted market; while downtown attracts smaller points-of-presence for peering, larger deployments often move to suburbs such as Elk Grove Village, Franklin Park, Oak Brook, and more. Land for development is often cheaper than in other primary cities, particularly for larger suburban sites that are adjacent to heavy power. All major cloud services are present in Chicago with full or edge regions, with certain companies electing to build their own large campuses for flexibility and scalability.
Whether needing to work with fintech, med tech, or simply requiring excellent connectivity and scalable capacity, Chicago is an excellent market for colocation from a handful of kilowatts to multi-megawatt primary locations!
The EdgeConneX campus in Elk Grove Village offers a secure, carrier-neutral environment for all deployments, with excellent access to downtown Chicago and beyond.
Empower Your Edge in Chicago
- Tier III design
- 25 miles from downtown Chicago
- 19.2 MW Chicago 3 facility available for lease and coming soon
- Engineered for customers requiring the lowest possible latency
- Purpose-built network connectivity platform
- Cloud, content, network and IT providers can deploy infrastructure in close proximity to their customers
- Ensures optimal performance, security, availability, and economics
To learn more, download the EdgeConneX Chicago data sheet HERE.
Schedule a virtual tour: https://www.edgeconnex.com/virtual-tours/
To tour our Chicago campus, please contact: info@edgeconnex.com
