Elk Grove Village Land Buy Clears The Way For $1B Data Center Complex

A $1B, 150-megawatt data center campus is on the way to Elk Grove Village now that the village has purchased the last major piece of property needed to begin construction of the complex.

After lengthy negotiations that at one point involved threats of invoking eminent domain, Elk Grove Village has agreed to pay $16.5M for the 5-acre Vulcan Construction Materials site at 1520 and 1700 Midway Court. The purchase follows previous village-led acquisitions of nearby office, retail and hotel parcels to assemble a tract large enough for the massive data center development.

Elk Grove Village plans to resell the two dozen acres it has purchased in total to San Francisco-based Prime Data Centers Corp. Prime is set to build what will become by far the largest data center in the village, which is already home to a cluster of 12 such facilities, according to the Daily Herald.

Prime’s plans call for three three-story buildings offering more than 750K SF for servers, wires and related equipment, both for it and for third-party customers expected to lease space there. The new data center will be roughly twice the size of another $1B center Microsoft is building nearby at the Elk Grove Technology Park.

Village officials, who will also soon vote on a tax increment financing district to pay for environmental remediation of the site, said acquiring the property for the project upfront would be an economic boon for the city. The data center campus is expected to generate as much as $4M annually in property and utility taxes and help lure associated economic development opportunities, the Daily Herald reported. 

The project is set to break ground next year.