Chicago construction updates

Now that construction is complete, we're going to bring you regular updates on some of the features of our Chicago data center.

Maintaining optimal temperature with our fan walls

Maintaining optimal temperatures in a data vault is essential to keeping critical infrastructure up and running. At our Chicago CH1 Data Center, we recirculate the heat produced in each of the 6MW vaults using our Vertiv Liebert fan walls. As warm air is exhausted from densely stacked servers into a contained hot aisle, the fan walls output cool 75°F air at a rate designed to maintain a constant pressure differential between the cold and hot aisles of our clients’ racks. The hot air is channeled into a common return plenum and then back to the fan walls where the cycle begins again. The units themselves are carefully placed throughout the vault to ensure that the entire vault meets the CFD modeling and hot spots are minimized. Click here to learn more about our Chicago data center.

March 2021

Interested in seeing the rest of the Chicago data center campus? Click the link here to watch the grand opening of our CH1 and HI1 data center campuses. Our guided tours will make you feel like you’re actually right inside the facilities!

December 2020

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October 2020

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August 2020

The construction team used a crane to lift the chillers to the roof of the building. The chillers are used to circulate cool water throughout the building.

July 2020

Installation on the IT Room is underway. The main distribution frame connects NTT’s infrastructure in the Chicago data center to the many providers and locations across the globe. The yellow and white track running above the MDF, otherwise known as the cable track, carries the signal from an enclosure to the MDF and out to the world.

June 2020

The team is preparing to pour the concrete flooring for vault one. This design includes a slab flooring and fan wall cooling technique.

May 2020

The North East exterior and South West exterior is in progress. Steel and glass will be placed over the wall studs in the next phase of construction. This is the exterior of where the ops team and other offices will be located. The concrete wall to the far right is where the vaults are located.

The interior partition framing is in progress. Watch the video.

The prefabricated exterior walls of the building have been shipped in and installed. By using prefabricated exterior walls, we’re able to simultaneously build out the interior, speeding up timelines of construction.

April 2020

The roof has been set, next the precast walls will be shipped to the site and installed to the sides of the building.

March 2020

The steel was officially topped out at the NTT CH1 project. Honoring a long-standing tradition, the final steel beam was painted white and affixed with the American flag. The beam was then signed by the ironworkers and other tradesmen. They also added the names of project team members from Clune, Verity and Linesight before it was hoisted into place. The topping out ceremony marks a very exciting milestone for this site!

November 2019

The first 6MW of critical IT load is currently under construction and is available for pre-lease. ‘The first building on our Chicago Data Center campus is standing up its core and shell now,’ said Doug Adams, President and CEO of NTT Global Data Centers Americas (formerly known as RagingWire Data Centers). ‘By using modular construction techniques, economies of scale, and carefully planned supply chain management, we have lowered construction costs and will be able to affordably offer all the space and critical IT power needed to help companies grow and scale their data center presence as their business needs evolve.’

October 2019

Introducing NTT’s Chicago Data Center campus. The 19-acre campus is located in Itasca, Illinois, which is the prime area for wholesale data centers. The campus will have two buildings offering a total of 72 megawatts of critical IT load. Each of the two buildings will offer 36 megawatts and 250,000ft² of space spread over two stories. The first six megawatts of critical IT load will be available in late 2020.