CyrusOne, Inc. has announced that it has closed on the previously announced acquisition of a suburban Chicago data center in Aurora, IL, from CME Group. This transaction expands CyrusOne's existing portfolio to more than 30 data centers across the U.S. and overseas and provides customers involved in the global financial markets with connectivity and proximity to the CME Globex platform.
“The closing of this acquisition marks an exciting milestone for us as we solidify our leadership position in the financial services market and enhance our services for enterprise customers in Chicago and across the U.S.,” said Gary Wojtaszek, president and chief executive officer, CyrusOne. “The acquisition represents the next step in our longer-term strategic plan to enhance our ability to innovate and support customers in the financial services sector. In addition, it creates significant opportunities by offering a unique ecosystem to energy, enterprise, fintech, and cloud customers. We look forward to expanding this global risk management campus to meet the growing and evolving colocation needs of customers.”
Transaction Highlights
The transaction was finalized for $130 million and adds to CyrusOne’s existing data center platform a 428,000-sq-ft facility data center serving the Chicago metropolitan region. In addition, CyrusOne will acquire approximately 36,000 colocation sq ft available for lease and approximately 15 acres of developable land directly adjacent to the data center.
In accordance with the sale agreement, CME Group has entered into a 15 year lease for data center space at the Aurora facility. The company’s electronic trading platform, CME Globex, is to remain in operation within this space. The agreement is expected to enhance the range of services available to CyrusOne and CME Group’s mutual customers through connectivity, hosting, and data offerings.
The transaction is expected to yield the following benefits to CyrusOne:
- Enhanced Geographic Diversification: The acquisition greatly enhances CyrusOne’s geographic diversification and can support large multi-megawatt deployments of critical infrastructure for the Fortune 1000, webscale and cloud companies that make up the world's connected economies.
- Expansion of a Global Risk Management Campus: The transaction provides current and new customers involved in financial risk management with open and cost-efficient access to an extensive digital eco-system that includes colocation, disaster recovery, private and public cloud access, data storage, and high performance compute.
- Strengthened Product Portfolio: The transaction provides an interconnected data center in one of the world’s largest internet hubs, further enhancing the attractiveness of CyrusOne’s National IX platform. It also provides the ability to support large deployments of web content and HPC environments that require massive connectivity to the global Internet.