Server Farm Realty, Red Sea Group's newly formed subsidiary, has acquired a large building in Chicago it plans to convert into a commercial data center. SFR president Avner Papouchado told DatacenterDynamics that the company plans to launch Phase I of the facility in the beginning of September.

The facility will provide wholesale colocation space: 900kW and up. "Some  retail [colocation] providers are our customers. We don't want to compete with our customers," Papouchado explained.

The building's gross square footage is more than 440,000. The site ÔÇô former General Electric manufacturing plant ÔÇô currently has three 7.5MW utility power feeds, with three additional 6MW feeds under development.

At full build-out, the facility will provide 142,000 sq ft of raised floor and 18 MW of critical load, with projected PUE of 1.3.

The bottom five floors of building will house data center space, with two top stories reserved for a total of about 100,000 sq ft of trading floor. The trading floor will have a dedicated entrance.

The developer is going after clients in the financial services sector by not only including a large trading floor in the facility, but also by selecting a building with low-latency fiber connectivity to 350 E. Cermak, a major carrier hotel in the city's central business district.

Fiber providers available to the future data center's tenants include AboveNet, AT&T, Level 3, Verizon, Qwest, 360 Networks, Fiberlink, Zayo and CSX.

Red Sea, a global real estate investment and development firm, is financing the speculative build using its own capital.

SFR also has 13,600 sq ft of data center floor under development in Santa Clara, California, and another 10,000 sq ft in Moses Lake, Washington.