Metro Edge Development Partners, a commercial real estate investment firm and Minority Business Enterprise (MBE), has announced that the company has executed a 75-year ground lease on a 1.97-acre parcel in the Illinois Medical District (IMD) that includes exclusivity to build and operate a high-performance data center.
Metro Edge has begun planning and permitting for a 21 Megawatt (MW), five-story data center comprising approximately 191,000 square feet. The greenfield data center will be located two miles west of the Loop in Chicago in the IMD, which represents the largest concentration of healthcare institutions, biotech hubs and tech incubators in the state. The IMD is the second largest medical district in the country serving over 80,000 visitors daily, including 29,000 employees.
“Metro Edge was founded with the intention of building data centers in underserved urban locations,” said Craig Huffman, CEO of Metro Edge. “These infill locations are typically overlooked by traditional institutional owners but offer a unique opportunity to facilitate meaningful change in a community with a thoughtful, integrated development.”
A healthcare-anchored data center in the IMD can positively impact low-income and medically vulnerable communities on the West Side of Chicago while addressing the urgent need for many of the IMD’s anchor healthcare institutions to upgrade their outdated data center infrastructure. The Metro Edge site possesses robust access and low-latency proximity to the utilities, fiber and power required for a world-class data center.
