Prime Data Centers has announced that it has started work on a large campus in Chicago, Illinois. The data center company held a groundbreaking ceremony for its $1 billion facility at 1600 East Higgins Road in Elk Grove Village, Illinois. This will be the company's first data center in Illinois and its first facility outside California. Prime DC first announced plans for the data center in September 2021. The 96,700 square meters (750,000 square feet) data center sits on 17-acre land. The facility will also deliver 175MW of power upon full build-out.
Prime plans three buildings for the facility, with ORD-01 being the first. Prime DC is marketing ORD-01 as a single-tenant hyperscale facility. The 35,700 square meters (384,000 square feet) building will have around 18,580 square meters (200,000 square feet) of data hall space and 72MW of power across three stories.
The CEO of Prime Data Centers, Nicholas Laag, said: "On behalf of everyone at Prime, I would like to thank Elk Grove Village and the numerous contractors and team members involved in readying ORD-01 for groundbreaking. The partnership between Elk Grove and the data center industry has led to unprecedented growth and positive economic impact. Looking ahead, we will continue to partner with forward-thinking governments, executing on an aggressive, multinational expansion plan that will establish Prime as the data center foundation for the global proliferation of content creation and cloud solutions."
Prime DC is also planning two more buildings on the site. The second building will offer 15,050 square meters (162,000 square feet) of data hall space and 63MW of power across three stories. The third building will be a two-story building with 8,730 square meters (94,000 square feet) of data hall space. It will also offer 36MW of capacity.