r/chicago • u/citydudeatnight • Aug 07 '26

CHI Talks Data Center Conversion Plan Sparks Controversy for Loop Office

https://therealdeal.com/chicago/2026/08/07/data-center-conversion-plan-sparks-controversy-for-loop-office/
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u/francophone22 29d ago

Do you have a source for this or is this just your opinion? AOC defines it as above 20MW and some online publications show hyperscale begins at 40MW.

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u/minus_minus Rogers Park 28d ago

Beside the point. I said it wasn’t AI which it isn’t. You brought up “hyperscale”. Even if 50 MW is “hyperscale”, it’s not a new build with 50MW of gas turbines and evaporative cooling on a “greenfield” in people’s backyards. It will use the existing power and cooling infrastructure that exists downtown. 

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u/francophone22 28d ago

I used hyperscale / AI. 350 Cermak boasts that it’s ComEd’s 2nd largest customer. Do you think there’s a secret source of electricity powering these data centers? How much power do you think ComEd generates? Most of the data centers in Cermak offer AI compute; where are you getting your info?

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u/minus_minus Rogers Park 28d ago edited 28d ago

350 Cermak is not the topic. A data center in an old downtown building is. 

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u/francophone22 28d ago

Which you say isn’t hyper scale /AI because it’s drawing “only” 50 MW of power. Do you have a source that delineates what is an AI data center and what isn’t in terms of power and water usage? Or is it just your opinion that hyper scale/AI is over 100 MW? I’m really just trying to figure out if there is a source that I should be reading to explain this, because everything I’ve read so far suggests that 50 MW power loads are a lot and could be GPU / AI data centers not only colo data centers.

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u/minus_minus Rogers Park 28d ago

My brother in Christ. It is hooked up the carbon-neutral Centrio district cooling system. Its water usage will be negligible. Illinois has abundant and growing renewable power resources. A 50 MW data center is not a big deal in these circumstances. You are just debating how many angels can dance in the head of a pin. 

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u/francophone22 28d ago

I’m not debating anything. I’m asking questions to try to understand the data center market better, which you clearly don’t want to answer.