CIM Group and fifteenfortyseven Critical Systems Realty (“1547″) have acquired Midway Technology Centre, an approximately 220,000-square-foot, vacant industrial campus consisting of a five-story building and surface parking lots. The property is expected to be converted into a 26 MW, Tier III+ data center with tech office space designed to address wholesale users’ increasing data and connectivity demands.
Located at 40 E. Garfield Boulevard between State Street and Wabash Avenue in Chicago’s Washington Park neighborhood, the property sits on 4.69 acres of an entire city block. The site was the former bread factory of the Schulze Baking Company that opened over a hundred years ago.
Midway Technology Centre is located in a fiber-rich area adjacent to multiple fiber-optic paths for metro and long-haul fiber into 350 E Cermak, the most interconnected data center in the central U.S. The historic industrial building will be rehabilitated and adaptively reused to accommodate a range of data center users seeking a presence in the greater Chicago metro area.
Chicago is one of the top data center markets in the United States and is a major hub for content delivery services due to its central U.S. location. Additionally, Chicago is an attractive data center environment due to its relatively low power costs, access to cross-continental fiber networks, large and growing co-location/cloud ecosystem, favorable business climate, international financial exchanges and low risk of natural disasters.
“Midway Technology Centre’s connectivity directly to the primary interconnection facilities will appeal to providers of low latency applications and cloud services to the greater Chicago community,” said J. Todd Raymond, CEO of 1547.” Additionally, with its location in both an Enterprise Zone and an Opportunity Zone, Midway Technology Centre is positioned to be a highly desirable option for all users of data center services. The acquisition of Midway Technology Centre further expands the partnership’s portfolio of premier data center assets in or adjacent to population centers to serve the growing data needs of businesses.”
Including Midway Technology Center, within the last year CIM and 1547 have acquired four properties for data center operations. Last summer the partnership acquired 400 Paul Avenue in San Francisco, a 7.3-acre property planned for a 240,000-square-foot data center campus located at one of the nation’s most important data center hubs in the San Francisco Bay Area. The partnership also owns an operating data center in Markham, Ontario, 20 miles outside of downtown Toronto, Canada, and an operating data center in Cheyenne, Wyoming.
