CME to Sell Chicago Co-Lo Datacenter

Under the terms of the sale, CME will enter into a 15-year lease for datacenter space, and will continue to operate its CME Globex electronic trading platform and offer co-location services from the datacenter.

CME will be able to expand its co-location services within the leased space going forward. CyrusOne and CME will also look to enhance the range of services available to mutual customers through connectivity, hosting and data offerings.

"Our clients will have more efficient access to a broader range of services," a CME spokesperson says, though specifics of these services are not yet available.

The acquisition increases the size of CyrusOne's portfolio to 33 datacenters across the US, Europe, and Asia, and strengthens its offerings in the financial services market.

"We don't hold real estate. We're getting rid of our real estate holding to focus on our core business," the CME spokesperson says, adding that this is in line with other real estate divestments in recent years, including the Chicago Board of Trade building in 2012, the New York Mercantile Exchange building in 2013, and the Kansas City Board of Trade building in 2014.

"CME Group is pleased to work with CyrusOne to maintain our co-location services while reducing our real estate holdings in line with our growth strategy. This transaction allows us to enter into a long-term lease to meet our datacenter needs while focusing our resources on what we do best-running our exchanges, providing global risk management and offering a broad range of technology services. Further, by entering into this relationship with CyrusOne, CME helps to ensure that our customers will have cost-efficient access to an even broader set of infrastructure and data services, including disaster recovery, cloud access, data storage and high-performance computing," says CME group chief financial officer John Pietrowicz in a statement.