Green Data Real Estate Inc. is in the process of buying a former Motorola campus in Harvard, Illinois, and plans to build a data center campus on the site.
The Canadian data center firm is in the process of buying the 303-acre site at 2001 N. Division St. campus. The deal is expected to close in July, but the price of the site hasn’t been revealed.
Built in 1997, Motorola vacated the 1.5 million-square-foot (139,000 sqm) cellphone manufacturing plant in 2003. Plans to turn the site into a water park or prison fell through, as did a campaign to persuade truck-maker Navistar to move its headquarters there.
In 2016, Canadian businessman Xiao Hua "Edward" Gong bought the property at auction from Optima Ventures for $9.3 million, but the $32 million smartphone manufacturing project he proposed never came to fruition. Ohio-based digital signage company Stratacache reportedly spent years trying to buy the property, before backing out last year and instead purchased a former chip factory in Oregon.
In 2017 Gong was charged with money laundering involving the sale of hundreds of millions of dollars of securities to Chinese citizens, and had his properties seized. A Canadian court previously blocked the sale of the site during his trial, but ruled in September that the site could be sold through the US Marshals Service while the case is ongoing.
“We're excited over the fact that Mr. Gong is no longer going to be the owner of the building,” Harvard City Administrator Dave Nelson said earlier this year after it was revealed a buyer had been found for the site.
The site has a number of buildings including a large manufacturing building, distribution building, warehouse, office building; and central services building.
Green Data reportedly plans to lease about two-thirds of the property to other businesses, with construction on the property and the leasing potentially beginning this year. The company also said it was installing solar panels to power the campus, which should take about six months.
In March, Green Data Center Real Estate signed a deal with Solar Alliance Energy Inc. to design a 56MW solar project for a 150 MW data center in Illinois. It’s unclear, but likely, this is the same project.
Green Data, previously known as NuYen Enterprise Hosting and NuYen Blockchain before that, currently own a 10MW hyperscale data center in Murphysboro, Illinois.
Green Data told the Chicago Daily Herald that upgrades could cost an estimated $12 million, with spreading mold and a non-functioning fire sprinkler system issues that need attention.
The Harvard Ordinance Committee recently voted to conduct a feasibility study for the creation of a tax increment financing district to supply some of those funds for the upgrades.
Earlier this year Baker Development Corp bought a former Motorola plant in Phoenix, Arizona, for $10 million and is considering building a data center on the site. In 2016 Digital Realty bought a former Motorola television assembly plant in Chicago, which it developed into a data center.
