CME outage Rooted in aurora Data Center, Now Owned by KKR and GIP
The recent notable disruption to CME Group’s trading operations stemmed from a failure at its Aurora, Illinois data center – a critical facility described as the “epicenter” for high-speed and futures trading. the data center is operated by CyrusOne, a major player in the data center industry, and was acquired in 2021 by a consortium of private equity firms KKR and Global Infrastructure Partners (GIP) for approximately $11.4 billion (roughly 1.8 trillion yen).
CyrusOne’s portfolio includes around 50 data centers across the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, and Singapore, serving diverse sectors including technology, financial services, energy, healthcare, research, and consulting. Industry experts confirm CyrusOne’s strong standing. Tobias Bopp, strategy and transactions manager at EY Parthenon, noted the company is actively building new data centers and holds a significant market position. Lauren Eccles, senior principal consultant for data center recruiting at First Point Group, described CyrusOne as having “a very good reputation.”
The acquisition by KKR and GIP was widely viewed as a strategic move to capitalize on the escalating demand for computing power driven by the burgeoning artificial intelligence (AI) sector and large technology companies.
Following a cooling system failure on November 27th,CME initially considered enacting its disaster recovery plan,which involved shifting operations to a data center near New York.However, CME opted to restart its matching engine in aurora after receiving data suggesting the cooling issue would be resolved more quickly than initially anticipated. CyrusOne’s website indicates the Aurora facility is equipped with redundant cooling systems for outage scenarios.
Thomas Sollerac, a partner at EY Parthenon, highlighted a potential design flaw, stating that data centers of this type “typically have a lot of redundancy in place to avoid these power and cooling issues.”
It remains unclear whether cyrusone explored relocating CME’s Aurora operations to an alternative data center during the outage.
KKR directed all inquiries regarding CyrusOne to the data center operator. GIP, recently acquired by BlackRock, declined to comment.
(Original reporting based on a Bloomberg article published November 28, 2024, with interview cooperation from Isis Almeida.)