Server Farm Realty, Inc. (SFRI) has completed the purchase of 840 S. Canal St. in Chicago. The year-end transaction of the eight-story, 443,446-sq-ft building located in downtown Chicago will be one of the largest data center developments in the Midwest.

The property was originally built with an extremely robust infrastructure to support manufacturing for General Electric, but was repurposed over the years as a check-processing and back-up operations site for two of Chicago’s most prominent financial institutions. In the continued evolution of this unique asset, SFRI will be realigning the site’s 38 MW of power and 250 lbs/sq ft of floor loading to support a state-of-the-art data center and trading floor space, which will be available September 2011.

The site’s strategic location-its proximity to low latency fiber connecting the downtown central business and trading district-is part of a purposeful design that serves the needs of prospective customers.

“Chicago is one of the hottest data center markets in the United States,” said SFRI president and chief executive officer Avner Papouchado. “We picked this location for its ability to deliver unmatched power density, high speed connectivity and a time-to-market that is currently unavailable anywhere else in the Chicago market.”

The facility will deliver the highest levels of reliability and efficiency to the critical needs of Chicago’s 60 Fortune 1000 companies, 28 Fortune 500 companies, 12 Financial Times Global 500 companies, 10 Fortune Global 500 companies, and 400 other major corporations.

The facility will feature 3.6 MW of critical load on each of its five data center floors with an N+1 concurrently maintainable electrical infrastructure powered by 20 2.5-MW generators housed in a dedicated exterior building. The data center is currently accessible via numerous carriers (AT&T, Verizon, AboveNet, 360 Networks, Cogent, CFN, Fiberlink, Level 3, CenturyLink/Qwest, and Zayo) and 3 separate substations that will be delivering 38MW of total power. The building also features 80,000 sq ft of trading space with redundant power of up to 30 W/sq ft and amenities for a top line trading operation.

The concept of purposeful design is synonymous with Server Farm Realty's parent company, Red Sea Group, which has developed over 7 million sq ft worldwide valued at an estimated $3 billion in construction since 1965. Server Farm Realty provides complete flexibility in lease options from shell to server-ready leases and anything in between. The company is also capable of building custom solutions on an as-needed basis.

SFRI has appointed CB Richard Ellis’ Chad Freese and Aaron Kulick to serve as the exclusive marketing agents for the site.