Chicago

Few cities have Chicago's financial infrastructure. It's home to three major exchanges, the Chicago Stock Exchange, the Chicago Board Options Exchange, and the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, making it one of the few US markets where colocation directly enables high-frequency trading and low-latency financial applications. NetActuate's Chicago facility (CHI) sits inside a campus shared with nearly 900 companies and close to 200 network providers, giving customers dense interconnection options most secondary markets can't match.

That density has a price signal behind it. Chicago's data center market is growing from 1.9 gigawatts in 2025 to 2.81 gigawatts by 2031, with vacancy sitting at a record-low 1.9% and average rental rates up 33% year-over-year. Illinois's sales-tax exemption on qualifying equipment and its competitive industrial power tariff have helped draw more than $11 billion in new data center commitments since 2019. For enterprises weighing coastal markets against the Midwest, that combination of tight supply and public incentives is pulling real capacity inland. NextMSCNextMSC

The facility itself spans 196,151 square feet of pre-cast concrete and steel-frame construction, connected through the Equinix Internet Exchange Chicago with carrier-agnostic cross-connects. Power runs on block-redundant, N+1 UPS systems backed by sixteen 2,500 kW diesel generators, while water-cooled centrifugal chillers with N+2 redundancy keep the facility running through Midwest summers.

Chicago's central geography is also a disaster-recovery advantage: the metro avoids the earthquakes, hurricanes, and wildfires that complicate siting on either coast, while sitting close enough to reach both coasts with minimal latency. Backed by HIPAA, PCI DSS, SOC 1 and SOC 2 Type II, ISO 22301, ISO 27001, and NIST 800-53/FISMA compliance, CHI is built to support regulated financial and enterprise workloads at scale.