About 45 minutes west of downtown Chicago lies a rather unassuming, glass-encased data center that some of the world’s largest markets depend on. By one 2018 estimate, at least $25 quadrillion of notional trade volume passes through the facility every day.

The Aurora, Illinois, complex has served as the primary hub of digital operations for the world’s largest futures exchange operator CME Group Inc. for nearly two decades. The 450,000-square-foot facility is famous among high-frequency traders and Wall Street firms, who’ve long jostled for position around the site to gain a leg up on competitors. At one point, DRW Holdings mounted an antenna on a utility pole near the complex to cut down on the latency. Rival Jump Trading bought property across the street for its own antenna. Scientel erected a tower, too.

Traders want to be close to the data center to reduce latency, minimizing the distance data must travel in order to shave microseconds off their trades. As a former executive of the data center’s operator once put it: “If you read the book "Flash Boys," you can get a real quick lesson on what’s going on.”

On Friday, the data center — located in the Chicago suburb probably best known for serving as the setting of the comedy film "Wayne’s World" — became infamous to all who trade across equities, foreign exchange, bonds and commodities markets globally. A malfunction in the cooling system at the complex took down virtually all CME futures and options trading platforms, wreaking havoc for traders around the world. The operator of the data center, CyrusOne, said that its teams were working “around the clock” to respond to the cooling system issue but didn’t respond to further questions.

This critical piece of infrastructure to global markets dates back to 2009, when CME started building the facility to host its electronic trading infrastructure, essentially serving as the backbone for CME’s futures and options trading platform Globex.

In 2016, CME decided it wanted to shift away from owning infrastructure and sold the site to Dallas-based CyrusOne. As part of the deal, CME agreed to rent space from CyrusOne for 15 years so it could continue to house the computers at the site that keep its markets running, essentially outsourcing its day-to-day operations.

CyrusOne knew what it was getting into. Gary Wojtaszek, the company’s chief executive officer at the time, described the data center to analysts as “ground zero” for high-speed trading and the “epicenter for all the futures trading.” In laying out the business case for a new tower that the company was building there in 2018 to boost connectivity, he emphasized that “speed is of the essence there.”

With that, CyrusOne added Aurora to a broader portfolio of roughly 50 data centers across the U.S., U.K., Germany and Singapore that serve customers spanning the technology, financial services, energy, medical, research and consulting industries.

CyrusOne’s business case is built on going after big clients like CME that are buying virtually all of the space in a data center, according to Tobias Bopp, a manager of strategy and transactions at the consulting firm EY-Parthenon. “They’re building a lot of new data centers, and their position in the market right now is pretty important,” Bopp said in an interview.

Lauren Eccles, a senior principal consultant specializing in data center recruiting for First Point Group, described CyrusOne as one “the big boys in the game,” pointing to the company’s strong presence in Germany in particular. Generally speaking, she said, “They’re a big player, and they’ve got a really good name.”

In 2021, that reputation caught the attention of private equity. As the artificial intelligence boom began sending data center demand soaring, KKR & Co. and Global Infrastructure Partners agreed to buy CyrusOne in a deal that was worth roughly $11.4 billion. It was held up at the time as an illustration of how private equity investors were looking to cash in on the surging computing needs of AI model developers and tech giants such as Amazon.com Inc., Alphabet Inc.’s Google and Meta Platforms Inc. Wojtaszek had resigned a year earlier.

It wouldn’t be the only, or the largest, data center deal for GIP. This year, after BlackRock Inc. bought the investment firm, GIP agreed to buy Aligned Data Centers in a $40 billion deal, marking one of the asset manager’s largest infrastructure investments ever.

KKR referred all questions on CyrusOne to the data center operator. A spokesperson for GIP owner BlackRock declined to comment.

It’s unclear whether CyrusOne tried to migrate CME’s operations at Aurora to another data center after the cooling units failed on Thursday.

And while CME’s disaster recovery plan calls for moving operations to a data center in the New York area, the exchange opted to restart its matching engine from Aurora, according to a person familiar with the matter. The decision was made because the information the exchange had at the time signaled that the cooling issue would be resolved more quickly than it was, the person said.

According to CyrusOne’s website, the data center features additional chiller units to protect against failures.

The cooling failure might suggest an issue with the design of the system, according to Thomas Solelhac, a partner at EY-Parthenon. “Normally, in data centers of this type, there is a lot of redundancy to avoid this kind of problem with power and cooling,” Solelhac said.

CME had expected its 2016 deal with CyrusOne to open it up to more computing resources. While fighting a proposal by Illinois lawmakers to tax trading on exchanges in 2016, CME Executive Chairman Terry Duffy, who is now CEO, suggested that the firm’s deal with CyrusOne would give it access to CyrusOne’s other data centers and not just Aurora.

“If we need to leave Illinois because of any irrational decisions coming out of the state,” Duffy had said at the time, “we have 29 data centers to choose from.”

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(With assistance from Isis Almeida.)

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