According to CBRE’s recent Global Data Center Trends report, hyperscalers and enterprise operators remain interested in Chicago. Technology, finance, and healthcare industries continue to drive strong demand for enterprise data center activity in the city.
From Q1 2022 to Q1 2023 inventory grew by 20.6%, while available lease space declined 2% year-over-year; leading North American rankings for the most significant decrease in vacancy from 8.2% down to 6.7%. Developers are competing heavily for power capacity on existing as well as newly constructed substations due to high demand from cloud service providers located nearby end-users which is expected further increase this trend of strong interest towards Chicago’s data centers market .
Land availability is extremely limited around O’Hare area but land prices remain stable despite broader macroeconomic conditions due both data center developers and institutional industrial developers showing a great deal of interest towards it .
