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Emblem Sub Level Logo Crain’s Special Report Part I: How Chicago became one of the nation’s most digital cities
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September 15, 2012

The hulking brown building isn’t much to look at: seven stories of concrete, brick and glass, covering half a city block in an old South Loop industrial area between the Chicago River and the Dan Ryan Expressway. But the gut rehab project on South Canal Street is a case study of how Chicago’s manufacturing past is enabling its digital future. It illustrates why the unique combination of geography and infrastructure that made Chicago a potent economic force for nearly two centuries positions it to flourish in the digital economy.

Server Farm Realty Inc., based in El Segundo, Calif., is spending more than $200 million to turn this former General, Electric Co. motor factory into a state-of-the-art data center, housing thousands of servers that will connect traders, corporations or telecommunications companies to the rest of the world.

“It’s got great bones,” says Avner Papouchado, the firm’s president. It turns out that data centers, like factories, need, lots of power, beefy concrete floors to hold heavy equipment and easy access to transportation. Where factories, required rail to move huge quantities of goods from coast to coast, data centers use the fiber optic cables that run, along railroad right-of-ways to sling massive amounts of data at the speed of light.

What’s happening at 840 S. Canal St. is more than just a quirk. Chicago is one of the half-dozen key vertebrae in the nation’s digital backbone because it lies at the center of many of the fiber optic cables that stretch between New York, and California, the country’s major connection points to the rest of the world via cables under the oceans. Chicago, has the third-biggest fiber optic capacity of any metro area in the country, behind New York and Washington. And, three of the world’s largest data centers are in Chicago or its suburbs.

Another reason Chicago is one of the most connected cities on the planet comes from its status as a research hub. The switching center on Northwestern University’s Streeterville campus known as StarLight - jointly run by Northwestern, University of Illinois at Chicago and Argonne National Laboratory - connects to more than 100 research networks around the globe.

To read the entire story, see: www.chicagobusiness.com/article/20120915/ISSUE01/309159977/how-chicago-became-one-of-the-nations-most-digital-cities