Demolition of Sears campus in Hoffman Estates could begin in the fall

A day after a data center developer bought the 273-acre former Sears campus in Hoffman Estates, meetings were scheduled with village officials for next week to discuss demolition of the 2.4-million-square-foot office complex this fall.

“They’ve given us every indication they want to hit the ground running,” Hoffman Estates Director of Development Services Peter Gugliotta said of Compass Datacenters representatives.

The Dallas-based firm closed on its purchase of the sprawling site 20 months after it was put up for sale, a time frame much shorter than many in the commercial real estate field thought likely in early 2022.

The company’s ambitions involve attracting established, recognizable tech companies as tenants of its planned data center campus, Gugliotta said.

Think Microsoft, Google, Meta and the like.

“This company is looking for the bigger users,” Gugliotta added. “Ideally, we want to get one user for the whole site, or at least a building.”

Microsoft already is building a data center campus just north of Bell Works Chicagoland in Hoffman Estates. Compass Datacenters is aiming to anticipate the future needs of such tech giants and be ready to accommodate them, Gugliotta said.

Microsoft might be just as likely as anyone else to be in the market for additional space on the Compass campus, Hoffman Estates Economic Development Director Kevin Kramer said.

Or there could be capacity for a hundred lesser known names on so large a site, he added.

The criteria for an ideal data center site includes space, a sufficient source of electricity, high security and a stable climate and environment.

Geographical proximity to its users is not necessary, Kramer said.

“They can serve the entire world from this one place,” he added. “You as a user of the cloud want your data to be safe. This data center wouldn’t just hold data from the Midwest or Chicago area.”

There’s no indication that the skyrocketing demand for data centers will slow in the foreseeable future, Kramer said.

“We feel that this pretty stable, that the need to store centralized data is pretty safe,” he said of the industry.

One usual obstacle in redevelopment projects – rezoning of land – won’t be necessary, Gugliotta said.

In anticipation of the demand for data centers, Hoffman Estates officials changed the village’s zoning code in 2022 to make them a permitted use, he explained.

https://www.dailyherald.com/business/20230913/demolition-of-sears-campus-in-hoffman-estates-could-begin-soon