Texas data-center developer under contract to buy Sears headquarters, sources say
Dallas-based Compass Datacenters is the company under contract to buy the 273-acre former Sears headquarters campus in Hoffman Estates, according to sources familiar with the pending transaction.
A developer of data center campuses, Compass Datacenters is in the process of being acquired by Brookfield Infrastructure Partners L.P. and the Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan, a company news release reported last month.
Compass founder and CEO Chris Crosby, along with his current management team, are expected to continue leading the company after the acquisition, which is anticipated to close by the end of the year.
Company officials could not be reached for comment on the former Sears property, but Crosby released a statement in June about the company's sale.
"The industry is at a critical inflection point today with AI and cloud demand continuing to fuel significant growth," Crosby said. "With Brookfield Infrastructure and Ontario Teachers' strategic expertise and deep financial resources, Compass is ideally positioned to meet growing demand for hyperscale data centers and campuses."
According to the company's website, Compass has developed more than a dozen data centers around the world, including in Minneapolis, Nashville and Montreal, as well as Milan, Italy, and Israel.
The former Sears headquarters is owned by Transformco, which formed in 2019 as a holding company for Sears assets in the wake of the retailer's bankruptcy. The site features seven interconnected office buildings and 120 undeveloped acres around them. The assessed value of the campus was $50 million in 2021, down from $150 million in 2013.
The sale of the Sears campus to Compass would continue a data center trend in Hoffman Estates that began with Microsoft's purchase of a 53-acre site north of Bell Works Chicagoland, where it plans a pair of 207,000-square-foot data centers. Construction on one of those data centers is underway, and a new ComEd substation is planned to serve the Microsoft campus.
In February, Microsoft bought an adjacent 30 acres.
The trend led Hoffman Estates officials to propose an electricity tax rate increase for high-volume users - like data centers - to fund the $16 million needed to replace the village's more than 50-year-old Fire Station 22 at 1700 Moon Lake Blvd.