One day after the Sangamon County Board voted March 23 to table a data center proposal, the city of Aurora, about 175 miles northeast of Springfield, enacted some of the nation’s tightest restrictions on future data center developments after years of citizen complaints.
The next Sangamon County Board meeting will be held at 6 p.m. Tuesday, April 7, and has been moved to the BOS Center to accommodate public turnout. However, it remains to be seen whether a County Board member will call forward the tabled zoning resolution that would allow CyrusOne to establish a $500 million data center in Sangamon County. Illinois Times reached out to four different Board members prior to publication – two Democrats and two Republicans – and did not receive responses from any of them.
Aurora has five operational data centers and another five that were in development prior to the passage of the city’s latest regulations, two of the 10 projects are owned by CyrusOne. The densely populated city is about three-fourths the geographical size of Springfield with nearly the same number of residents as all of Sangamon County, and residents have complained about noise, lighting and other issues stemming from the close proximity of the various data centers.
One regulation that will affect current data centers in Aurora is that unless “generators are supplying backup electrical supply during a power outage, testing of generators…may only occur between the hours of 9 a.m. and 5 p.m. Monday through Friday, and not on holidays. No more than two generators may be tested simultaneously.”
The Sangamon County data center plans include 420 diesel-powered backup generators that are “tested for 10-15 hours per year for maintenance purposes” and to be used in case of emergencies. In comparison, Springfield Memorial Hospital utilizes six backup generators for its main hospital in case of an outage.
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Trinity Consultants, an international environmental consultancy firm, was hired by CyrusOne to conduct a noise study that considered “projected sound levels from data center cooling equipment, backup generators and other auxiliary equipment” that would be used for the Sangamon County site.
“As there are no adjacent residential districts or properties, the project is expected to be compliant with the Sangamon County Noise Code…tuning will be addressed with the attenuation manufacturers as design progresses,” the study reads. “We assume sound produced from generators during a power-outage scenario is exempt from noise code requirements.”
Kathleen Campbell, a retired professor at SIU School of Medicine who focused on audiology, spoke in opposition to the data center during the March 23 County Board meeting. She estimated, through multiple decibel recordings of a CyrusOne data center in Aurora provided to her by several Aurora residents, that the proposed project would near or exceed the threshold for exceeding county noise standards.
“There’s no compliance in Aurora (regarding noise standards), why would there be any compliance here?” she said.
Another concern frequently expressed by citizens who addressed the County Board was how the increased electrical usage required by the data center would affect utility rates. Representatives from CyrusOne have sought to reassure the public that there will be no impact stemming from the project.
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However, a recent federal emergency order allowing the temporary operation of two Indiana coal plants might impact ratepayers across some of the country’s electrical grid operators, including the Midcontinent Independent System Operator (MISO) that covers a large portion of Illinois.
Last year’s congressional testimony from Jennifer Curran, vice president for planning and operations at MISO, is referenced in the Department of Energy’s recent order. She cited “an unexpected demand for energy-hungry data centers to support artificial intelligence.”
“A growing reliability risk is that the rapid retirement of existing coal and gas power plants threatens to outpace the ability of new resources with the necessary operational characteristics to replace them,” Curran said.
Illinois Times reached out to RECC, the local utility company that would be connecting the data center to the grid and has supported the proposal, for comment but did not receive a response.
Economic incentives
During the March County Board meeting, Bradd Hout, CyrusOne’s location and power strategy director, said that CyrusOne, a company operating in nearly 10 countries, has about 700 employees.
“We’re regular people doing a job and doing a job to serve the digital economy that we all operate within,” Hout said.
That means a Sangamon data center with 100 full-time employees would account for more than 12% of the company’s total workforce, not accounting for other projects in development. That many full-time employees would also far outpace the rate of hiring for other data center projects in the state, which create an average of about 20 new jobs per data center.
While the private-equity backed company has said it’s not pursuing local tax abatements or contesting property valuation in order to pay less in property taxes, CyrusOne has taken advantage of state tax breaks for other projects in Illinois. The company received more than $147 million in tax breaks from three data centers in DuPage County and one in Kendall County.
From 2020 through 2024, more than 14,000 new jobs can be attributed to businesses that began to utilize three separate state programs.
Economic Development for a Growing Economy, or EDGE, is a tax credit program first authorized in 1999 under Republican Gov. George Ryan to encourage a wide variety of businesses to take root in Illinois. Walgreens and Hershey Chocolate are examples of companies that have utilized the EDGE tax credits.
Gov. JB Pritzker signed two new programs into law, starting with the Data Center Investment Program in 2019, followed by REV Illinois, or the Reimagining Energy and Vehicles in Illinois program, in 2021.
Companies that took part in the state’s Data Center Investment Program from 2020 to 2024 created anywhere from an estimated 4,000 to 8,000 temporary (potentially ongoing) construction jobs and just under 600 new permanent jobs.
That translates to roughly 150 to 300 “construction-related jobs” and just over 20 “full-time jobs associated with operations and maintenance” per data center.
Some key requirements to qualify for the state’s data center tax incentives are:
- Capital investment of at least $250 million
- The project must result in at least 20 new full-time or full-time equivalent jobs associated with the operation or maintenance of the data center. Jobs must have total compensation that matches or exceeds “120% of the average wage paid to full-time employees in the county where the data center is located.”
- “Within two years of the project being placed in service, demonstrate that the data center is carbon-neutral” or attain a specific green building standard.
- Data center “must require its contractor to enter into a project labor agreement” approved by the Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity.
Most of the land for the proposed site, which Hout previously told IT would be purchased if zoning approval is granted, is owned by various entities related to Dowson Farms of Divernon. Dowson Farms is also the landowner for the vast majority of the Double Black Diamond Solar farm, adjacent to the proposed data center site.
Through its various entities, Dowson Farms paid $7.6 million total for four separate parcels of farmland in 2023 and 2025, according to county property records, that CyrusOne now plans to purchase. The contract to purchase is not public, so it is not known how much CyrusOne plans to pay for the land.
In 2024, CyrusOne paid nearly $61 million for about 230 acres in Kendall County to develop a data center in Yorkville. It was previously owned by Green Door Capital, a private equity company based in Chicago, which purchased the land in 2023 from a farm based in nearby Oswego for around $8.5 million. That farm operator, NGH Farms, purchased the land from ComEd in 2003 for $3.8 million.
This article appears in April 2-8, 2026.
