Vacant office complex could become site of first data center in Rolling Meadows

A prominent yet long-vacant Rolling Meadows corporate office center is set to be demolished to make way for a data center, in what would be the city’s first of the increasingly controversial computer storage sites.

Austin, Texas-based data center developer Digital Realty’s plans call for a three-story brick and masonry building housing 156 megawatts of critical power, which would be supplied by a two-story, 240-megawatt ComEd substation, at 3800 Golf Road.

In September, Digital Realty purchased the 40-acre Atrium Corporate Centre — at the confluence of the Jane Addams Tollway and Route 53 — for $81.5 million from Rosemont-based Brennan Investment Group.

Brennan, developer of the nearby 85-acre Elk Grove Technology Park, had proposed data centers among a variety of uses at the 40-acre Atrium site, including manufacturing and distribution. But Brennan was able to flip the property for a handsome return after buying it out of foreclosure for $27 million in 2023.

So far, the kind of public opposition to data centers seen elsewhere hasn’t surfaced in Rolling Meadows. The city council nearly a year ago quietly approved zoning code changes that allow data centers at that location, which is zoned for manufacturing.

While the data center itself is entitled by right, the council Tuesday night took first steps toward granting other zoning relief needed for the redevelopment. That includes creating a plat for the substation on a 4.6-acre lot on the north side of the property, and a 35.3-acre lot for the data center on the south side. A special use permit for utilities is also needed for the substation.

The unanimous, preliminary vote — pending a final tally Nov. 24 — came via the council’s consent agenda without discussion or public comment.

Those actions were precipitated by other property owners along the corporate-heavy Golf Road corridor — including engine manufacturer Weichai America Corp. and insurance giant Arthur J. Gallagher & Co. — signing off on the release of a decades-old restrictive covenant that may have prohibited a data center in the area.

City officials support the plan for economic development reasons, said Glen Cole, the assistant city manager and director of community development.

“We have a number of these vacant or underperforming office campuses, and we need to put them into productive use. We’ve lost a lot of economic activity from them essentially being mothballed or worse,” Cole said. “For a lot of reasons, we think that if you’re going to build a data center, the site we have there at 3800 Golf makes a lot of sense.”

Among them, according to Cole: the site is bordered by two major highways, a busy state road and commercial/industrial users, and there’s no residential around.

“It has a lot of strengths as far as where to responsibly site these facilities,” Cole said.

In their zoning application, Digital Realty officials noted city plans calling “for repurposing antiquated and obsolete properties and attracting emerging industries.”

“The city also found that data centers are similar in scale and infrastructure needs to other permitted (manufacturing) uses, but produce much less noise, traffic and emissions,” Digital Realty officials wrote.

The three-story, 485,000-square-foot office building — once the home of AT&T, 3Com, a Capital One call center, and where the Federal Aviation Administration inked a lease to relocate its regional headquarters before backing out amid the building’s pending foreclosure — has struggled to remain fully occupied.

After the 2023 acquisition, Brennan and city officials unveiled plans for a $100 million redevelopment with 600,000 square feet of industrial space across two buildings. But there never was a “clear path to power” to the site, Cole said, as transmission lines along the tollway were tapped out by other data center users in the Northwest suburbs.

At the same time, ComEd was inundated with requests from speculative data center developers, but many “were not that serious,” Cole said.

He said ComEd now has a plan to deliver power there, and the developer had to post a letter of credit to ensure the infrastructure that is built is prepaid.

Work on the project might not start until 2029, under a preliminary timeline.

cplacek@dailyherald.com