Workers have started tearing down the vacant Sears world headquarters in northwest suburban Hoffman Estates, Illinois, a necessary next step in converting the iconic 2.4 million-square-foot complex into a data center site.

“No one is going to come in and say I want 2 million square feet of office space,” said Village Manager Eric Palm. “The Sears campus put Hoffman Estates on the map, but there just isn’t a high demand for office anymore.”

Dallas-based Compass Datacenters bought much of the 273-acre site at 3333 Beverly Road on the village’s far western edge last year and plans to construct five massive data centers, which house the IT components needed to run the internet.

“In putting together an economic development strategy, you try to have a diverse portfolio, just like you would in a personal investment portfolio, and one of the sectors we’re trying to build up is the high-tech side of things,” Palm said. “That will work well with our strong retail base, and we also have a good group of manufacturers along the I-90 corridor.”

The demolition will stretch into mid-2025, and each data center will take about 15 to 18 months to complete, said Katy Hancock, vice president of public relations for Compass. The entire complex could eventually draw $10 billion of investment, including funds spent by its future tenants.

“This is a great opportunity to breathe new life into a space that has been vacant for years,” she said.

American Demolition Corp. is handling the teardown, and Project Executive Jeff Olson said millions of pounds of concrete will be crushed on-site and poured onto the development’s east side, eventually making it level with the western half, as Compass needs a completely flat site for its data centers. In total, about 400 million pounds of debris, between 85% and 95% of the complex’s material, will be reused on-site or recycled.

“We’re lucky as an industry that the vast majority of demolition debris can be recycled,” Olson said.

Tearing down the Sears complex isn’t as simple as pushing over an old single-family home with a bulldozer, he added. The massive complex contains a multitude of five- and six-story buildings, and crews need to take down each one with special equipment and wrecking balls.

“Tall buildings just take longer, because you’re working on something that goes six stories up in the air, and nothing goes fast six stories up in the air,” Olson said. “We’re chewing through the buildings as fast as we can, but as safely as we can.”

Sears moved its headquarters from Chicago’s Sears Tower, later renamed Willis Tower, more than 40 miles northwest to Hoffman Estates in 1992, during an era when top local firms such as McDonald’s and Motorola were relocating to sprawling, suburban office campuses.

Thousands of employees commuted to the big retailer’s new campus every day, but traditional department stores eventually declined, leading to hundreds of store closures and a 2018 bankruptcy. Sears and its surviving assets were then purchased by Transformco, which put the corporate headquarters up for sale in 2021.

McDonald’s and other big suburban office users moved back to downtown Chicago in the past decade, and attracting data centers will help northwest suburban towns fill up those empty corporate campuses, Palm said. Elk Grove Village has already become a major hub for data center companies, and in 2021, Microsoft secured approval to build a facility in Hoffman Estates.

Palm said he expects to see a property tax windfall from the new Compass complex, and village officials have rezoned a portion of Hoffman Estates to attract even more data centers.

“Now, I’ve got people knocking down our door saying, ‘We want to put our data center there,’” he said.

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