CyrusOne has broken ground on its newest addition to the Chicago market — a 425,000-sq-ft data center on the company’s Aurora, Illinois campus. Construction is commencing on part of the land acquired in March 2016 as part of the sale-leaseback transaction with CME Group. The newest data center will provide CyrusOne customers involved in the global financial markets with additional space and connectivity, as well as proximity to the CME Globex platform and it offers a unique ecosystem to energy, enterprise, fintech, and cloud customers.

 “Breaking ground on this new data center marks another milestone for us as we solidify our leadership position in the financial services market and enhance our services for enterprise and cloud customers,” said Kevin Timmons, chief technology officer, CyrusOne. “Upon completion, our new state-of-the-art data center will provide needed data center space and provide customers with expanded cloud connectivity. In addition, the City of Aurora has been a valued partner for CyrusOne, and as one of the preeminent data center providers in Illinois, we are excited to expand our activities with the community by creating new local jobs.”

Located in suburban Chicago, the new data center will have high-speed, high-capacity network connectivity directly to downtown Chicago’s telecommunications hub, with a strong network offering to accommodate customers with specific latency and/or replication needs. As part of CyrusOne’s National IX (Internet Exchange) platform, the Aurora data center will supply interconnection to other CyrusOne data centers.

The groundbreaking will be officially celebrated on Thursday, December 1 at the Aurora campus.