QTS Data Center Construction Project

QTS is one of the fastest-growing data center companies in the world, with nearly 5 million square feet of usable data space. QTS partnered with Mortenson in 2014 to redevelop the former Chicago Sun-Times printing facility into a best-in-class mega data center. Opened in July 2016, the strategically located 30-acre campus near downtown Chicago has significant capacity to provide QTS' unique integrated product platform of the custom data center, colocation and cloud managed services. 

Since the opening, Mortenson has continued to develop the campus and remains on-site today. With 2 MW of power deployed upon opening, Mortenson has further installed 12 MW and completed a two-story addition to the facility. Work is currently underway on a new 80,000 square foot data hall space and the next round of significant power/cooling deployments. When fully developed, the 467,000 square foot building will support a total of 208,000 square feet of raised floor encompassing 40 megawatts (MW) of power.

Mortenson also built the most critical component on the QTS campus: a new 125 MW Substation. With the demand for power increasing as the campus expands, the new substation is part of a long-range plan to meet the immediate and anticipated needs of QTS customers. Careful coordination and planning with the local utility company and trade partners allowed us to overlap work on the data halls with the substation project, streamlining construction, and accelerating the initial schedule. The intricate process of taking the entire data center off the existing grid and moving it to the new substation service was successfully completed with zero interruptions.