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On HawkTalk 45 David discusses the always interesting Chicago data center market with Andy Cvengros. Andy lives in the Chicago area and is continually active in the data center industry while working from home through COVID-19.

Here are a few quick takeaways from our conversation below.

Historical growth of the Chicago data center market

As a major metropolis, Chicago has always been in a prime location when it comes to being the connectivity hub of the midwest. When the financial market grew so rapidly in Chicago, it brought many other industries up with it, including the data center industry. Now, data center development is spread throughout the city to facilities accommodating both hyperscale and enterprise data center users.

Chicago, the tale of two data center markets

Chicago can be divided into the downtown and suburban data center markets. The suburban area is composed of larger-scale facilities that attract more hyperscale users, and the downtown area is more competitive at attracting companies with higher latency needs.

Recently passed tax incentives expected to boost Chicago interest

Chicago was previously known as a market that had higher taxes which made the decision for data center professionals to jump into that market difficult. That changed for last year when Illinois passed a few general infrastructure bills that also included data centers which meant that the industry would receive benefits from these changes. This move made Chicago similar to the Dallas or the Northern Virginia markets when it comes to tax benefits, and has seen a lot of additional activity begin to form since then.

We also talked about…

• How COVID-19 will impact the Chicago market in the future
• What the story of the Chicago market will be for the rest of 2020
• Some of the benefits for Andy since he’s been working from home

Don’t forget to check out the rest of our HawkTalk's and don’t miss out on our latest release of market data for the data center industry.