An affiliate of real estate and infrastructure investment giant Brookfield has paid more than $83 million for a data storage facility near Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport as part of its purchase of Cyxtera out of bankruptcy, adding to a wave of data center investments in the area.
The Brookfield affiliate in January paid $83.5 million for the ORD2 building at 2425 Busse Road in Elk Grove Village, Illinois, according to DuPage County property records. The seller of the 163,747-square-foot building was a Deutsche Bank affiliate.
It was part of a long-planned takeover of Cyxtera’s assets in several markets, which required bankruptcy court approval. As part of the deal, Brookfield agreed to buy substantially all of Cyxtera’s assets and purchase properties from several of Cyxtera’s landlords.
That $775 million deal, completed last month, brings together Brookfield’s existing, Dallas-based Evoque data storage company and Cyxtera’s properties to create a combined company with more than 50 locations, mostly in North America, according to an Evoque statement when the deal closed last month.
The Elk Grove Village deal comes after massive investments already made in recent years in the area around O’Hare as data storage demand continues to rise.
Just across Busse Road, Digital Realty recently recapitalized two data centers in a deal with GI Partners that valued the two-building campus at $900 million.
In nearby Itasca, Illinois, Japan’s NTT Global Data Centers late last year paid $27.5 million for two office buildings that it is expected to demolish and replace with new data centers, near other facilities it already has been developing in the area.
About 20 miles northwest of the Busse Road data centers, Compass Datacenters last year paid $194 million for the former Sears headquarters office complex in Hoffman Estates, Illinois, which it is expected to demolish and replace with five data storage buildings.
Toronto-based Brookfield declined to comment to CoStar News beyond Evoque’s previous statement about the Cyxtera takeover. In a recent letter to unitholders, Sam Pollock, CEO of Brookfield’s infrastructure business, said, “2024 is off to a strong start having closed the acquisition of a North American retail colocation data center business, Cyxtera, and securing a portfolio of 78,000 telecom towers in India that will generate significant synergies when combined with our existing operations.”
Deutsche Bank did not immediately respond to a request for comment from CoStar News.
Brookfield’s Pollock added in the letter that “the newly created platform will be a leading retail colocation data center provider, with over 330 megawatts of capacity deployed in high demand areas across North America.”
