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Nine Floors in Chicago High-Rises: Field Notes on Delivering Critical Space Vertically

Field Notes • October 29, 2026

Chicago is a tight colocation market. CBRE's H1 2026 report puts overall vacancy at 2.2% and says no contiguous space of 5 MW or more will be available in 2026, with large contiguous projects arriving in late 2027 at the earliest. Power adds to the squeeze: CBRE's global trends report says ComEd's power-delivery timelines in Chicago extend into 2032 or later. For many owners and tenants, that pushes attention toward smaller blocks of capacity in buildings that already have power and network. Floors in existing towers are one answer, and they are a different delivery problem from a campus or a purpose-built shell. This note looks at that problem class through one MDI program and recent reporting.

The program in brief

MDI's Urban High-Rise Data Center Program in Chicago delivered nine single-floor data center deployments at 500 kW to 750 kW each, inside vertical, multi-tenant urban buildings. The project page describes a multi-owner model and an owner, developer, and design-build partnership. Its own summary of the problem is limited space, vertical routing constraints, and multi-tenant coordination, where rework and schedule slips are costly.

The answer was what the page calls paper-first planning: resolve coordination conflicts on paper before field work starts, source equipment on a vendor-agnostic basis, and standardize planning across the floors. The reported results are less rework and fewer field conflicts, more predictable outcomes across the deployments, better schedule reliability, and gains in turnover and maintainability. The page does not publish schedule or cost figures, and neither does this note.

Where vertical delivery gets hard

Most of what follows is practitioner judgment, with recent reporting where it exists.

  • Routing. Every kilowatt has to reach the floor and the heat has to leave it, through shafts, risers, and shared systems that were usually sized for offices. The riser path is often the first thing that limits a floor, ahead of the floor area itself.
  • Structure and logistics. Racks, UPS equipment, batteries, and cooling plant weigh far more per square foot than an office layout assumes, and they have to get to the floor. In an October 2026 Data Center Knowledge piece on vertical builds, IDC's Luis Fernandes said most vendors design power and cooling equipment for horizontal placement, and that weight, freight elevator dimensions, and crane access all matter. The structural check belongs ahead of the space plan.
  • Generators and heat rejection. Where the engines and cooling plant go, and what the neighbors and the city will accept, shapes the whole design. The same article notes the developer of a proposed Kansas City tower said it would accept binding conditions on noise and generator operating hours.
  • Fire and life safety. NFPA 75 is the standard of reference for protecting IT equipment and its rooms from fire, smoke, heat, and water, per its published scope. In a tower, rated separation, suppression, and the tie-in to the base building's alarm are code and authority questions to settle early, against the edition and local amendments in force.
  • Live tenants. Outages, noise, and access windows are negotiated with the landlord and the neighbors, not scheduled unilaterally.

Why planning on paper pays

In a live building, the field is the most expensive place to discover a conflict. A coordinated model and a standardized floor design let each deployment start from a resolved layout instead of rediscovering the same riser and clearance questions nine times. That is the logic behind the MDI program's reported gains in predictability.

Downsides and risks

Be clear about the costs before choosing this path.

  • Cost per kW. Delivered cost per kW in an occupied tower should be expected to run higher than at a purpose-built site, because of constrained logistics, off-hours work, and custom solutions. That is practitioner judgment, not a measured figure. The same Data Center Knowledge piece gives one data point from a proposal, not a built project: the Kansas City developer estimated about $1,300 per square foot and acknowledged that exceeds suburban costs, with roughly $107 million of $167 million in hard costs going to mechanical, electrical, plumbing, and fire protection. Costs are also rising everywhere. Cushman & Wakefield's 2026 development cost guide, as reported by IREI, found construction costs per MW up an average of 21% over the prior edition, though not specifically for high-rise work.
  • Density caps. Structure, shafts, and heat-rejection paths set a ceiling that you cannot buy your way past. The nine floors above sit at 500 kW to 750 kW each. Reporting on a converted Minneapolis building, covered below, noted that an existing building's structural constraints make future expansion difficult and that its 20 MW lease is a fraction of what a purpose-built hyperscale site delivers.
  • Dependency on landlord and neighbors. Your schedule and your uptime rest on lease terms, building operations, and approvals you do not control. Existing power is also not free power: the Minneapolis owner spent more than $70 million on improvements while taking the data center from 2 MW to 21 MW.
  • When it is not worth it. Skip the tower when the requirement is multi-megawatt contiguous capacity, when high-density cooling needs more than the building's shafts and roof can support, or when the landlord will not grant rights over your own equipment, utilities, and generator placement. JLL's Michael Martin made a related point in the Data Center Knowledge piece: large AI training clusters usually favor land and power over downtown sites.

Opportunities

Done well, the approach offers things a greenfield site cannot.

  • Proximity. In the same article, Martin sees urban opportunity in financial services, telecom, content delivery, and inference, and Fernandes notes that physical proximity matters for workloads like high-speed trading.
  • Power already in place. Legacy Investing's Daniel English described the Minneapolis project to Bisnow as using stranded power in a mostly vacant building. With utility timelines in Chicago running years out, capacity that is already on site can be worth more than a lower build cost elsewhere.
  • Availability. With contiguous capacity scarce in the metro, a floor-scale deployment can be the capacity that is actually obtainable.
  • Repeatability. A standardized design across several floors turns a one-off problem into a process, which is the basis the MDI program page gives for its improved schedule reliability.

A documented example: Legacy Investing in Minneapolis

Legacy Investing, a Virginia-based real estate developer, bought a six-story, mixed-use building at 1001 Third Avenue South in downtown Minneapolis in 2019. According to Commercial Observer's April 2026 reporting, Sleep Number's headquarters stayed on the lower floors while Legacy upgraded the data center in the building from 2 MW to 21 MW, with more than $70 million in improvements. In January 2026 the building sold to a joint venture of Cloud Capital and Arcapita for a reported $235 million, roughly eight times its previously assessed value, with most of the capacity leased to an AI and cloud inference provider. English said deep 1980s floor plates suit data centers better than housing because, in his words, "servers don't care."

Read the case with its limits in mind. DCD reports the building was constructed in 1988 as a mainframe and print operations facility and later served as a recovery data center, so it was not a plain office shell. The reporting describes the financial outcome, not the engineering delivery, and the Minneapolis owner is a developer, not a user of the space. It is evidence that an occupied, multi-tenant building can be converted into leased critical capacity and valued accordingly, not a template for a Chicago high-rise.

MDI can help with adaptive reuse of existing buildings and with the technical due diligence that tests whether a floor can carry the power, load, and cooling before a lease or purchase is signed. The approach behind both is documented in our Urban High-Rise Data Center Program.

Talk to one of our advisors about delivering critical space in constrained multi-tenant buildings

Sources

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