Newcastle Partners Gets Greenlight for Data Center Near Chicago

A developer’s proposal to build a two-story, 245,000-square-foot data center in a west Chicago suburb is inching along.

The Hillside Planning and Zoning Board of Appeals has voted in favor of the project, set to rise on a 13-acre tract at 101 North Wolf Road, west of the Hillside CarMax, the Village Free Press reported.

The entity behind the project is listed as DPK Hillside LLC, although Park Ridge-based developer Newcastle Properties owns the parcel.

Representatives from architecture firm Ware Malcomb presented the proposal during a recent village meeting. The facility, as outlined, will feature 62 parking spaces, nine loading docks and 30-foot-wide landscape buffers.

Some residents raised concerns regarding potential noise pollution from the data center, but the village board approved it unanimously.

“Today, families are suffering from loud train noise and highway noise,” Hillside resident and activist Roger Romanelli told the outlet. “We have talked to many families. They don’t want more loud noise from the data center on Wolf Road.”

A lawsuit brought against the village by Newcastle added complexity to the decision. Newcastle previously proposed a light manufacturing and warehouse complex for the site, which faced resistance from residents and failed to secure village approval despite multiple modifications. That spurred the lawsuit.

Newcastle said the data center would cause minimal truck traffic and pollution. Truck traffic will only occur during the installation and replacement of data servers, and the firm has plans to mitigate noise and light pollution through technology and infrastructure improvements, said Kevin Boyd, a member of the development team.

The proposed data center aligns with growing demand nationwide, driven by the increasing need to store computing equipment and related hardware to run the internet and “just about everything else digital,” Andrew Schaap, CEO of Aligned Data Centers, previously told Forbes.

Looking ahead, the developers anticipate that it will take at least two years to complete the data center, which is expected to accommodate one to two large-scale tenants and employ 15 to 39 workers.

—Quinn Donoghue

Correction: This story was updated to correct the firm that owns the land in Hillside, after a previous version misidentified a similarly named company as its owner.