Digital Realty Buys Hawthorne Race Course, 108 Acres, for $90M
A shuttered horse track outside Chicago just became the clearest read yet on what hyperscale demand does to oversized legacy parcels.
Digital Realty has been identified as the buyer behind the $90 million purchase of Hawthorne Race Course, a 108-acre horse track in Stickney, Illinois, that borders Cicero and ran its last races July 19. The Real Deal reported August 21, citing people familiar with the deal, that Digital Realty is the company behind Allimac 2023 LLC, the entity under contract for the site at 3501 South Laramie Avenue. The track’s owner filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in February, and the sale is expected to close September 1. Neither Digital Realty nor the seller has confirmed development plans, but officials in both suburbs are already moving to block a data center on the parcel.
Why it matters
For any developer sitting on an oversized legacy parcel, a race track, a dead mall, an old rail yard or industrial tract, Hawthorne is the clearest signal yet of what that land is now worth to hyperscale buyers. A 108-acre contiguous site inside Chicago’s inner ring, unencumbered by an active tenant and already served by utility infrastructure, drew a real-money bid from one of the largest data-center landlords in the country before any rezoning was in place. That reprices every comparable large parcel near power and fiber, whether or not its current use has anything to do with computing. It also comes with a cost developers should price in up front: Stickney’s board voted this week to adopt a moratorium blocking data-center proposals, and Cicero’s trustees passed a resolution opposing the project, opposition that landed before the deal has even closed.
The numbers
The $90 million price for 108 acres works out to roughly $833,000 per acre, well above typical suburban Chicago land comps for a site with no current entitlement for data-center use. Digital Realty already operates two Chicago-area campuses nearby: a 40-acre, three-building complex in Franklin Park totaling 574,994 square feet, and a second campus in Elk Grove Village exceeding 1.1 million square feet. Hawthorne would extend that footprint rather than establish a new one.
What’s next
The sale is expected to close September 1, and Digital Realty has not filed local entitlement paperwork or issued a statement on its plans. Stickney’s mayor has said he will vote against any data-center proposal that reaches the board, and Cicero’s opposition resolution signals a fight over water use, power draw and around-the-clock cooling noise well before groundbreaking. Developers watching the national data-center land market should treat the entitlement fight, not the purchase price, as the real cost of this category of site.