CME Group, operator of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, one of the world's largest options and futures exchanges, has launched a large new data center in the Chicago area.

Earlier this week, CME moved its electronic trading platform called Globex to the new facility in Aurora, Illinois, Dow Jones Newswires reports. Besides expanding its capacity for growth of trading volume for the next 10 years, the move also provided a small improvement in execution speed.

Not much detail has been revealed about the new data center, other than its size of about four American football fields. The facility gets its power through feeds from two nearby nuclear power plants.

CME plans to launch the second phase of the facility in early 2012, at which time it will start offering colocation services to trading firms at the new data center.

In addition to supporting Globex, the data center will also connect to international futures exchanges operated by BM&F Bovespa SA of Brazil, Bolsa Mexicana de Valores of Mexico and Bursa Malaysia Bhd.

The news comes less than two weeks after another large exchange operator, NYSE Euronext, launched trading of first stocks at its new data center in Mahwah, New Jersey. The first 19 companies' stocks began trading there on 9 August and NYSE plans to move the rest of stocks traded on its Amex exchanges to the new facility by the end of August.

NYSE plans to move all of the exchanges it operates in the US to the Mahwah data center by early next year. The operator is also readying for launch a second new facility in Basildon, UK.