Journal & Topics Media Group

United Airlines Selling Former Mount Prospect Campus To Cloud HQ

New $2.5 Billion Data Center Development Expected

Empty parking lot at 1200 Dempster St. owned by United Airlines was annexed into the village of Mount Prospect.

Preparations are underway for United Airlines to sell most of its large campus of office and residential buildings in southern Mount Prospect to make way for a new $2.5 billion data center development.

Mount Prospect Community Development Director Bill Cooney confirmed last week that Washington, D.C.-based Cloud HQ intends to purchase all of United’s property along Dempster and Algonquin roads at Linneman Road, with the exception of the airline’s data center on the site. The cost of the proposed transaction is unknown.

Cooney said Cloud HQ is scheduled to bring its proposal before Mount Prospect Planning and Zoning commissioners at their Thursday, Dec. 9 meeting in village hall. He added that the proposal is for Cloud HQ to build three data center buildings, each about 560,000 square feet. Cloud HQ is a rapidly expanding company that says it has built and leased 2.4 million square feet of data center space in the last five years.

The three planned buildings would front on Dempster Street, Algonquin Road and Linneman, with a new ComEd substation on Linneman across from the main campus.

Cooney also said the proposal will likely come before village trustees at their Tuesday, Dec. 21 board meeting. If approved, he said demolition of existing United buildings on the acreage could begin this spring with construction beginning in the fall.

A data center houses computer servers that host internet websites or larger web-based communication portals, such as United Airlines’ ticket systems, in secure buildings. They use large amounts of electricity and water to serve air conditioning systems to keep computer servers from overheating.

“To power each of the 84 megawatt (MW) buildings, a new substation is proposed to be constructed and operated by ComEd at the southeast corner of Dempster Street and Linneman Road,” a village report said.

Construction is expected to take 18 months. The $2.5 billion investment is expected to see between 900 and 1,000 construction workers on-site working more than 2.1 million labor hours.

A village report estimates each building will create between 75 and 150 permanent, high-skilled, high-earning jobs, with estimated average annual salaries starting at $70,000. 

Developers plan pedestrian paths on three frontages of the project to link to retail on Algonquin Road, Dempster Street and Busse Road and to Kopp Park north of Dempster along Linneman.

United Airlines moved the majority of its 3,000 employees out of the suburban campus to Chicago 15 years ago, which at the time was in unincorporated Elk Grove Township. Last week United said it was moving 900 of its Chicago-based employees to new quarters in Arlington Heights.

About 10 years ago, United built a 200,000 square foot data center on its old campus for its own dedicated use, which was incorporated into Mount Prospect at the time.

Cooney said the roughly 100 workers who have remained at the Mount Prospect United Airlines data center “aren’t going anywhere.” The remaining former United Airlines campus was also later incorporated into Mount Prospect.

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