400 S. LaSalle Office Conversion Continues The Chicago Data Center Boom

Downtown Chicago Office Flip Highlights Data Center Gold Rush at 400 S. LaSalle

A year after trading hands for just $12 million, the former headquarters of Cboe Global Markets at has sold again, this time for $40 million, underscoring one of the most dramatic value surges in Chicago’s commercial property market in years.

The 6-story property, located at the southern edge of the Loop, was purchased by Legacy Investing, a Virginia-based developer specializing in data storage, logistics, and life science facilities. The seller, a joint venture between Prime Group (led by Mike Reschke) and Capri Investment Group (led by Quintin Primo), had acquired the building in mid-2024 and performed power upgrades to make the structure data-center-ready—a move that tripled its value.

 

 

A New Chapter for Chicago’s Office Conversions

While much of downtown Chicago continues to wrestle with high office vacancy, the sale is a rare bright spot. It highlights how office-to-data-center conversions are emerging as a niche form of office conversion, especially in well-connected financial districts.

“This building already had deep wiring and structural capacity from its trading-floor history,” said Daniel English, co-founder and managing partner of Legacy Investing. “Urban data centers are in high demand because they provide low latency for uses like high-frequency trading, streaming, and AI applications.”

Legacy plans to transform the former Cboe headquarters into a 33-megawatt data storage facility, a $100-million-plus investment that will be ready for service by late 2026. The project is being built on speculation, meaning no tenants have been pre-leased—a bold move in today’s capital-constrained environment.

Why It Matters & A Playbook for Reuse

The sale at 400 S. LaSalle illustrates a broader shift in industrial real estate and digital infrastructure investment. As the need for artificial intelligence, streaming, and autonomous vehicle data continues to rise, investors are targeting buildings that can handle enormous power loads and cooling demands.

Prime Group and Capri’s swift value creation mirrors a broader investor playbook: buy vacant office assets at a deep discount, make targeted infrastructure improvements, then reposition for tech, biotech, or data-centric uses.

The partnership’s other major downtown project, the redevelopment of the into Google’s new Chicago campus, reflects the same adaptive-reuse mindset. In each case, dated office stock is being reimagined for higher-yield, future-proof uses.

At 400 S. LaSalle, the 1980s-era building’s column-free floors and power capacity made it ideal for the next generation of urban data storage. Cboe had vacated the property after moving its headquarters to the Old Post Office in 2019 and its open-outcry trading floor to the Board of Trade Building in 2022.

The Bigger Picture

The transaction also demonstrates a rare instance of price appreciation in Chicago’s Central Business District, a market still coping with record-high vacancy and climbing borrowing costs. Most office building assets have traded at steep discounts or fallen into distress.

But this deal shows that commercial real estate value can still surge when location, infrastructure, and emerging tech demand align, along with significant redevelopment dollars, of course. Downtown Chicago’s dense fiber connectivity and proximity to financial exchanges make it one of the few urban markets where data centers can compete with sprawling suburban campuses.

The Outlook

For developers and investors, the 400 S. LaSalle sale may mark a new frontier for the Loop. As more office towers face obsolescence, office-to-data-center and office-to-industrial conversions could become a lifeline for the city’s aging stock.

The transformation also reaffirms Chicago’s role as a data-driven logistics hub, bridging its manufacturing, trading, and digital economies in one vertical ecosystem.

With the rise of AI and cloud computing reshaping demand, commercial investors are realizing that the next big warehouse may not store tangible goods at all, but data…