T5 Data Centers Ups Suburban Chicago Land Buys to $60 Million

Pete Marin’s data center firm is loading up on suburban Chicago’s North Shore.

Atlanta-based T5 Data Centers, whose CEO is Marin, bought 32 more acres of vacant land in Grayslake, bringing the amount it has spent in the last year on assembling real estate in the area to nearly $60 million, according to public records. T5 now controls 255 acres as it prepares to build a massive campus of data centers on property once slated for an industrial complex.

More land purchases are likely to come. T5’s Grayslake project — its fourth in the Chicago area with two in Elk Grove and one in Northlake — will be by far its largest investment in the region. The square footage of the Elk Grove and Northlake projects combined is 670,000 square feet, while T5 is planning 20 buildings spread across more than 300 acres in Grayslake, with each offering 60 megawatts apiece of computing capacity. The first phase of the campus is set to come online in 2027.

T5 was aiming for a 160-acre site offering 480 megawatts when it announced plans for a Grayslake campus a year ago, and it has grown its ambitions since.

It’s among several data center developers aggressively acquiring land in suburban Chicago as well as the city, with purchases of outdated office and industrial complexes that they’re proposing to either demolish or repurpose into cloud storage and tech facilities. This rush aims to satisfy the increasing demands of artificial intelligence and computing power.

Longtime Chicagoland businessmen Michael Alter and Jim Woldenberg were the sellers in the latest T5 deals. Alter sold 18 acres for $7.8 million, or $433,333 per acre, while Woldenberg sold 14 acres for $5.6 million, or $400,000 per acre. Alter’s firm had owned its parcels since at least 2006, while Woldenberg bought his parcels from Alter in 2022 for $4.2 million, public records show.

Alter sold 134 acres in Grayslake for $29 million to T5 a year ago in a deal representing a substantial departure from the Alter Group’s plans in the area. Alter Group for years tried to build a 641-acre business park, having gained approval to do so in 2009. But the project remained mostly undeveloped for over a decade, and only generated activity with Medline’s 1.3 million-square-foot distribution facility three years ago, before Alter Group’s land sale to T5 Data Centers.

Alter Group didn’t return a request for comment, and neither did Woldenberg, who was contacted through his Vernon Hills-based laboratory supplies firm Heathrow Scientific. T5 didn’t return a request for comment.

Alter Group’s deal with T5 last year represented a significant shift for the seller’s once-grand plans for the area. The firm — which is led by Michael Alter, owner of the WNBA’s Chicago Sky — has been a large local landowner with development hopes of its own for over 15 years. Its 641-acre vision known as the Cornerstone business park was approved by Grayslake officials back in 2009 and stayed largely dormant until Medline’s 1.4 million-square-foot facility opened three years ago.