CME Group today announced that it has entered into a definitive agreement to sell its suburban Chicago data center in Aurora, Ill. to CyrusOne, Inc., (NASDAQ: CONE) a global data center services provider, for $130 million. The transaction is subject to customary closing conditions.
As part of the sale, CME Group will enter into a 15-year lease for data center space and will continue to operate its electronic trading platform, CME Globex, from the data center and will offer co-location services there. CME Group will have the ability to expand co-location services within the leased space going forward. The agreement also outlines the ways in which CyrusOne and CME Group will enhance the range of services available to their mutual customers through connectivity, hosting and data offerings.
"CME Group is pleased to work with CyrusOne to maintain our co-location services while reducing our real estate holdings in line with our growth strategy," said CME Group Chief Financial Officer John Pietrowicz. "This transaction allows us to enter into a long-term lease to meet our data center needs while focusing our resources on what we do best - running our exchanges, providing global risk management and offering a broad range of technology services. Further, by entering into this relationship with CyrusOne, CME helps to ensure that our customers will have cost-efficient access to an even broader set of infrastructure and data services, including disaster recovery, cloud access, data storage and high-performance computing."
"The acquisition-leaseback of this facility offers unique advantages to our customers involved in the global financial markets by providing connectivity to those transacting on the CME Globex platform. With this facility, and with CME Group as our tenant, we are excited to have the opportunity to expand the global risk management campus in Chicago - the preeminent financial services co-location hub in the industry - which will be a cornerstone of our unique and rapidly growing data center platform," said Gary Wojtaszek, president and CEO, CyrusOne. "This acquisition helps solidify our position in the financial services market and will create additional FinTech opportunities by offering a unique ecosystem to our financial, energy, enterprise, and cloud customers."
Through this acquisition, CyrusOne will increase the size of its portfolio to 33 data centers across US, Europe, and Asia, and strengthen its offerings within the financial services market. The facility is approximately 428,000 square feet. It features next-generation security, fire protection, and infrastructure enhancements.
Jim Rosenbloom and Mike Manuel of the law firm of Goldberg Kohn represented CME Group. DLA Piper advised CyrusOne.