{"id":414041,"date":"2025-11-30T01:32:18","date_gmt":"2025-11-30T01:32:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/414041\/"},"modified":"2025-11-30T01:32:18","modified_gmt":"2025-11-30T01:32:18","slug":"what-to-know-about-cyrusone-the-data-center-behind-the-markets-meltdown","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/414041\/","title":{"rendered":"What to know about CyrusOne, the data center behind the market\u2019s meltdown"},"content":{"rendered":"

About 45 minutes west of downtown Chicago lies a rather unassuming, glass-encased data center<\/a> that some of the world\u2019s largest markets depend on. By one 2018 estimate, at least $25 quadrillion of notional trade volume passes through the facility every day.<\/p>\n

The Aurora, Illinois, complex has served as the primary hub of digital operations for the world\u2019s 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\u2019ve long jostled for position around the site to gain a leg up on competitors. <\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Related<\/p>\n

\"Alphabet<\/p>\n

Traders want to be close to the data center to reduce latency, minimizing the distance data must travel in order to save microseconds. <\/p>\n

Business Briefing<\/p>\n

Become a business insider with the latest news.<\/p>\n

By signing up, you agree to our\u00a0Terms of Service<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0Privacy Policy.<\/a><\/p>\n

On Friday, the data center \u2014 located in the Chicago suburb probably best known for serving as the setting of the comedy film \u201cWayne\u2019s World\u201d \u2014 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 \u201caround the clock\u201d to respond to the cooling system issue but didn\u2019t respond to further questions.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s futures and options trading platform Globex.<\/p>\n

\"CyrusOne's<\/p>\n

CyrusOne’s in 2019 opened the first phase of its data center in Allen.<\/p>\n

Steve Brown<\/p>\n

\u2018Ground Zero\u2019<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

CyrusOne knew what it was getting into. Gary Wojtaszek, the company\u2019s chief executive officer at the time, described the data center to analysts as \u201cground zero\u201d for high-speed trading and the \u201cepicenter for all the futures trading.\u201d <\/p>\n

In laying out the business case for a new tower that the company was building there in 2018 to boost connectivity, he emphasized that \u201cspeed is of the essence there.\u201d Wojtaszek resigned in 2020.<\/p>\n

With that, CyrusOne added Aurora to a broader portfolio of roughly 50 data centers across the US, UK, Germany and Singapore that serve customers spanning the technology, financial services, energy, medical, research and consulting industries.<\/p>\n

CyrusOne\u2019s business case is built on going after big clients 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. \u201cThey\u2019re building a lot of new data centers, and their position in the market right now is pretty important,\u201d Bopp said in an interview.<\/p>\n

As it would turn out, CyrusOne was itself about to be added to a private equity investor\u2019s even broader portfolio.<\/p>\n

In 2021, 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. <\/p>\n

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.\u2019s Google and Meta Platforms Inc.<\/p>\n

It wouldn\u2019t 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\u2019s largest infrastructure investments ever.<\/p>\n

KKR referred all questions on CyrusOne to the data center operator. A spokesperson for GIP owner BlackRock declined to comment.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s unclear whether CyrusOne tried to migrate CME\u2019s operations at Aurora to another data center after the cooling units failed on Thursday. It\u2019s also unclear whether CME activated its own disaster recovery plans, which call for moving operations to a backup data center. Neither company responded to questions on this.<\/p>\n

According to CyrusOne\u2019s website, the data center features additional chiller units to protect against failures.<\/p>\n

The cooling failure might suggest an issue with the design of the system, according to Thomas Solelhac, a partner at EY-Parthenon. \u201cNormally, in data centers of this type, there is a lot of redundancy to avoid this kind of problem with power and cooling,\u201d Solelhac said.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s deal with CyrusOne would give it access to CyrusOne\u2019s other data centers and not just Aurora.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf we need to leave Illinois because of any irrational decisions coming out of the state,\u201d Duffy had said at the time, \u201cwe have 29 data centers to choose from.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"About 45 minutes west of downtown Chicago lies a rather unassuming, glass-encased data center that some of the…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":414042,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5135],"tags":[5229,1596,2437,158,358,3187,67,586,132,5230,68,2969],"class_list":{"0":"post-414041","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-dallas","8":"tag-america","9":"tag-dallas","10":"tag-stock-market","11":"tag-technology","12":"tag-texas","13":"tag-tx","14":"tag-united-states","15":"tag-united-states-of-america","16":"tag-unitedstates","17":"tag-unitedstatesofamerica","18":"tag-us","19":"tag-usa"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115636073968626030","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/414041","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=414041"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/414041\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/414042"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=414041"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=414041"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=414041"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}