CME Group Data Center (Aurora)
Aurora, USA · Established 2012
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The CME Group Data Center stands at 2905 East Diehl Road in Aurora, Illinois, approximately thirty miles west of downtown Chicago along the Interstate 88 corridor. Construction began in 2009, and CME occupied the facility—designated internally as DC3—in 2010, consolidating the Globex electronic matching engine that had previously operated from data centers closer to the city center. The building encompasses 428,000 square feet of data center space on a campus served by two 138,000-volt transmission-quality utility feeds from separate generation plants, delivering ninety-two megawatts of redundant power. In 2016, CME sold the physical building to CyrusOne, a data center real estate investment trust, for $130 million, entering a fifteen-year leaseback arrangement under which CME continues to operate its matching-engine infrastructure within the facility (now renamed CyrusOne Aurora I). In 2018, CyrusOne erected a 350-foot communications tower on the campus to support the microwave links that high-frequency trading firms use to transmit signals between Aurora and New Jersey data centers. The architecture of the building is purely functional—windowless walls, backup generators, cooling systems, security perimeters—bearing no resemblance to the grand exchange halls that preceded it. The contrast with CME’s institutional ancestor is stark: the Chicago Board of Trade Building at 141 West Jackson Boulevard, designed by Holabird & Root and completed in 1930, rises forty-four stories in Art Deco limestone, crowned by John Storrs’s faceless aluminum Ceres. The Aurora facility, by contrast, is deliberately anonymous, a fortress of computation hidden in a suburban office park. Yet the Globex matching engine housed within processes trades in all six of CME Group’s asset classes—interest rates, equity indices, foreign exchange, energy, agricultural commodities, and metals—executing millions of contracts daily with round-trip latencies measured in microseconds. As Donald MacKenzie argues in Trading at the Speed of Light (Princeton, 2021), the Aurora data center represents the material endpoint of a transformation that began when the CME partnered with Reuters in 1987 to develop what became the Globex electronic trading platform, launched on June 25, 1992, as the first global electronic futures exchange.
The visual culture of the CME and its predecessor institutions constitutes one of the great lost spectacles of modern capitalism. For over a century, the trading pits of LaSalle Street produced a sensory experience unlike any other in finance: hundreds of traders packed into octagonal pits, wearing brightly colored jackets that identified their firms, shouting bids and offers in a carefully choreographed system of open outcry while simultaneously communicating through an elaborate language of hand signals first developed in the 1970s after the CME created the International Monetary Market. Emily Lambert, in The Futures: The Rise of the Speculator and the Origins of the World’s Biggest Markets (Basic Books, 2011), describes the pit as a “self-organizing ecosystem” where physical proximity, vocal power, and social bonds determined who got filled and at what price. The colored jackets—each firm’s traders identifiable at a glance across a crowded floor—became iconic visual markers of the Chicago trading culture. Photojournalists extensively documented the final years of open outcry; Crain’s Chicago Business published a notable multimedia project, “The Last Days of Floor Trading,” capturing the human drama of the pits’ decline. CME closed most of its futures pits in July 2015, when open-outcry volume had fallen below one percent of total trading; the remaining options pits were shuttered temporarily in March 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic and permanently closed in May 2021. The CBOT’s grain options pits, the last survivors of the oldest futures exchange in America, met the same fate. Above the CBOT building, Storrs’s Ceres—a 31-foot, 6,500-pound Art Deco figure holding a sheaf of wheat and a bag of corn, deliberately left faceless because Storrs reasoned no one would see her features at 605 feet—remains the most recognizable symbol of Chicago’s derivatives markets. The transition from pit to screen replaced this visual theater with an entirely different aesthetic: the Bloomberg Terminal’s green-on-black interface, CME Direct’s web-based trading platform, and the Depth of Market (DOM) ladder that enables “click trading.” Where the pit trader read the market through physical signals—body language, vocal tone, the surge of bodies toward a broker—the screen trader reads a numerical abstraction, columns of bid and ask quantities flickering at speeds beyond human perception. MacKenzie, in “Material Signals: A Historical Sociology of High-Frequency Trading” (American Journal of Sociology, vol. 123, no. 6, 2018), characterizes this as a fundamental shift in the material basis of price formation, from embodied human interaction to algorithmic signal processing.
Aurora’s significance in global finance derives not from its civic character but from its position within what Donald MacKenzie calls “the world’s financially most important geodesic”—the latency corridor connecting Chicago’s derivatives markets to the equity exchanges of northern New Jersey (Trading at the Speed of Light, Princeton, 2021). The data center sits thirty-five miles west of LaSalle Street, the traditional home of Chicago futures trading since the CBOT’s founding in 1848. Aurora was chosen for prosaic reasons: available land, abundant and redundant electrical power from multiple generation plants, proximity to major fiber-optic trunk routes along the I-88 corridor, and geographic separation from downtown Chicago’s earthquake and flood risks. But the facility’s location has generated an extraordinary geography of competitive infrastructure. In 2010, Spread Networks completed an 827-mile fiber-optic cable from the Chicago area to Carteret, New Jersey, at a reported cost of $300 million, cutting through the Allegheny Mountains to achieve a one-way latency of approximately 13.1 milliseconds—a story chronicled in Michael Lewis’s Flash Boys (Norton, 2014). Yet fiber was soon surpassed: because electromagnetic signals travel approximately fifty percent faster through air than through glass, firms including McKay Brothers and Jump Trading (through its New Line Networks joint venture with Virtu Financial) erected chains of microwave relay towers along the Aurora-to-New Jersey corridor, reducing one-way transmission times to roughly four milliseconds. McKay Brothers’ network, which hugs the geodesic great-circle path between the two points, is widely reported as the fastest commercial link. CME charges substantial fees for colocation—housing trading firms’ servers in racks adjacent to the matching engine within the Aurora facility—because even microseconds of additional latency disadvantage a trader relative to closer competitors. Eric Budish, Peter Cramton, and John Shim, in “The High-Frequency Trading Arms Race” (Quarterly Journal of Economics, vol. 130, no. 4, 2015), demonstrate that the arms race for speed between Aurora and New Jersey is driven primarily by the arbitrage relationship between CME’s E-mini S&P 500 futures and the SPDR S&P 500 ETF (SPY) traded at NYSE Arca in Mahwah, New Jersey—a correlation so tight that even a five-microsecond speed advantage can generate consistent profits.
The institutional lineage of the CME Group Data Center reaches back to 1898, when Chicago’s butter and egg dealers organized the Chicago Butter and Egg Board at LaSalle and Lake Streets, a spin-off of the Chicago Produce Exchange. Reorganized and renamed the Chicago Mercantile Exchange in 1919, the institution traded agricultural futures—butter, eggs, onions, potatoes—for decades in relative obscurity compared to its older rival, the Chicago Board of Trade. The CME’s transformation into a global financial powerhouse began with Leo Melamed, a Holocaust survivor who had fled Poland as a child. On May 16, 1972, Melamed launched the International Monetary Market (IMM) at the CME, listing futures contracts on seven foreign currencies—an innovation that Milton Friedman endorsed in a commissioned feasibility study after the collapse of the Bretton Woods fixed-exchange-rate system. As Melamed recounts in Escape to the Futures (Wiley, 1996), the academic establishment initially dismissed currency futures as gambling, but the contracts found immediate demand from multinational corporations and banks seeking to hedge foreign-exchange risk. Interest-rate futures followed in 1975, and in 1982 the CME listed futures on the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index, creating the instrument that would become the most heavily traded futures contract in the world. The Globex electronic trading platform, developed in partnership with Reuters Holdings PLC beginning in 1987 at a cost of $75 million, went live on June 25, 1992, offering after-hours electronic trading—initially just four contracts in its first overnight session. The CME demutualized in November 2000, converting from a member-owned cooperative to a for-profit corporation, and completed its initial public offering on December 11, 2002, raising $185 million at $35 per share. The merger with the Chicago Board of Trade in July 2007 created CME Group in a deal valued at $8 billion; the acquisition of the New York Mercantile Exchange in August 2008 for $11.2 billion added energy and metals, giving CME Group roughly ninety percent of all U.S. futures volume. On May 6, 2010, the Flash Crash erased nearly $1 trillion in market value within minutes; the Department of Justice later charged Navinder Singh Sarao, a trader operating from his parents’ home in Hounslow, England, with spoofing E-mini S&P 500 futures contracts on CME’s Globex platform. CME occupied its Aurora data center in 2010, and by 2021 had permanently closed nearly all open-outcry trading pits. As of 2025, CME Group, publicly traded on NASDAQ under the ticker CME with a market capitalization exceeding $80 billion, is the world’s largest derivatives exchange by volume, reporting record average daily volume of 28.1 million contracts.
The CME Group Data Center in Aurora processes an extraordinary breadth of derivative instruments spanning six asset classes, a range unmatched by any other exchange facility in the world. Interest-rate futures and options constitute the largest category by notional value: the Eurodollar futures contract, introduced in 1981, was for decades the world’s most actively traded futures contract until CME completed the conversion of all Eurodollar open interest to SOFR (Secured Overnight Financing Rate) derivatives in April 2023, following the cessation of USD LIBOR; Treasury futures on two-year, five-year, ten-year, and thirty-year U.S. government bonds remain among the exchange’s most liquid products. Equity index futures, led by the E-mini S&P 500 (ticker ES), are the most visible products to the broader investing public: each E-mini contract represents fifty times the index value, and average daily volume regularly exceeds one million contracts with implied daily notional turnover surpassing $100 billion—far exceeding the combined dollar volume of the underlying 500 stocks. As Kawaller, Koch, and Koch demonstrated in “The Temporal Price Relationship between S&P 500 Futures and the S&P 500 Index” (Journal of Finance, vol. 42, no. 5, 1987), S&P futures frequently lead the cash equity market in price discovery, a relationship that has only intensified with twenty-three-hour electronic trading. In May 2019, CME launched Micro E-mini contracts at one-tenth the size of the standard E-mini, with a $5 multiplier, democratizing access for individual traders as the notional value of the full-size contract had grown from approximately $47,000 at its 1997 launch to well over $200,000. Agricultural futures—corn, wheat, soybeans, soybean oil, soybean meal, live cattle, lean hogs, feeder cattle—represent the original Chicago markets, the direct descendants of the standardized grain contracts formalized by the CBOT in 1865. Energy futures, acquired through the NYMEX merger, include West Texas Intermediate crude oil (the global oil benchmark) and Henry Hub natural gas. Metals traded include gold, silver, copper, platinum, and palladium, inherited from COMEX. Foreign exchange futures, Melamed’s 1972 innovation, cover all major currency pairs. Options on futures are available across virtually every product. As Emily Lambert observes in The Futures (Basic Books, 2011), Chicago’s fundamental invention—the standardized, centrally cleared futures contract—transformed price risk into a tradable commodity, and the Aurora data center is where that invention now operates at its fullest scale and speed.
Images will be added as the project develops. Photographs by Larry Ng and from research sources.