If all ‘projections’ go according to plan, Sangamon County could have the most well-staffed hyperscale data center in the state.
The CyrusOne data center slated for Talkington Township in southwest Sangamon County is expected to have four main buildings that convert 1.8 million square feet of farmland into the foundation for racks of computer servers suited to run 24/7.
For reference, that four-building data center campus would be large enough to comfortably hold 25 BOS Centers, and a baker’s dozen of the expanded BOS Center once it’s complete. Despite being nearly 30 times smaller than the planned CyrusOne data center, the current BOS Center employs 175 full-time and part-time staff – almost double the 100-employee figure touted by data center proponents.
Blair Felter, CyrusOne’s vice president of marketing, told Illinois Times the company stands behind its projection that the data center will create more than 100 permanent jobs, despite a memorandum of understanding signed with the state in May that lists 25 full-time jobs.
“The MOU specifically identifies 25 as the minimum number of new employees required under that agreement. CyrusOne’s 100-plus figure reflects our projected permanent employment for the fully built campus, and we continue to stand by that projection,” Felter wrote Sept. 3 in an email.
“The 100-plus figure has been consistently and publicly communicated throughout this project. It was included in our formal project materials submitted to Sangamon County, discussed during the public review process, and included in our March 2026 letter to County Board members, which stated that the campus is expected to support more than 100 permanent jobs once operational, including HVAC technicians, electricians, data center technicians, facilities managers, security personnel and maintenance specialists,” she wrote.
Testimony by CyrusOne representatives at the Zoning Board of Appeals in February cited the 100 jobs, as did a letter sent to the County Board by CyrusOne’s president, which both predated the signed MOU. That contract outlines tax breaks for CyrusOne and its tenants, so long as the data center developer can supply 25 jobs paying 120% of the county’s median wage.
Ryan McCrady, president and CEO of the Springfield Sangamon Growth Alliance, told Illinois Times the 100-job figure is binding. He referenced Bradd Hout, CyrusOne’s location and power strategy director, telling the ZBA under oath that “the front end of the building are office components, so once this is constructed, 100 permanent employees will be working on campus.”
“I 100% trust that CyrusOne’s going to employ this (number) of people because it was part of their sworn testimony to the county (ZBA),” McCrady said. “I would be concerned if they didn’t meet what they stated under their sworn testimony, absolutely.”
Northwestern University professor Nadav Shoked, who teaches courses on property, regulatory and local government law, told Illinois Times that’s a lot of wishful thinking.
“This is what we see in a lot of these situations where (developers) promise the moon and the stars but then when you start digging in, they’re not actually making a promise,” he said.
Shoked pointed out that it’s unlikely Sangamon County would have much legal recourse against CyrusOne since the zoning application materials that reference the permanent job figures are not hard numbers, and the county did not “demand that the developer put it in writing.”
In this case, the only documents that list 100 jobs are letters written by CyrusOne president John Hatem, signed in January and March.
“The project will create over 100 new permanent positions and require the services of 500-plus construction personnel continuously throughout the development cycle,” states the January letter, while the March letter claims that “because data centers operate 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, these positions offer stable employment with long-term career growth opportunities.”
The letters submitted by Hatem are “not a hard commitment,” Shoked said.
“It’s very tough to read this as a real, hard commitment because ‘500 plus,’ that’s not a real number of construction personnel, and it says ‘over 100’ (permanent jobs), which is also not a specific number,” Shoked said.
He said developers are seeking to get the most for their investment, and it’s the responsibility of elected officials to make sure that promises are kept, not necessarily the developer.
“A lot of these promises that are being publicized to the public are not necessarily backed by actual legal commitments made to the county,” Shoked said. “The developer’s job is to get the best deal they can, and to market their project the best way possible to the public, and it’s fine. That’s what they’re supposed to do; they don’t owe the residents of the county or the residents of the state of Illinois anything. It’s your elected officials or my elected officials that do.”
The MOU grants CyrusOne’s local LLC a series of 20-year tax breaks, largely sales tax exemptions for costly computing infrastructure and building materials. That document lists 20 full-time jobs for maintenance and five for operations, which will “make a capital investment of at least $500,000,000 resulting in the creation of at least 25 full-time equivalent new jobs by the company, including any tenants, over the 60-month period set forth.”
Those 25 employees are required to be paid just more than $83,000 per year – 120% of the county’s average annual wage.
As for the projected 75 other employees? CyrusOne did not respond to an inquiry about how much those would-be employees could expect to earn.
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Aaron Gurnsey, president of the Central Illinois Building & Trades Council who is also a Growth Alliance board member, told IT the council received a signed project labor agreement from CyrusOne.
“PLAs do not dictate the number of workers that contractors are required to put on the job. I will say that I have visited a few of these large data center projects recently. I believe that 400-500 construction workers is a conservative estimate during peak construction,” Gurnsey wrote.
The Illinois Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity’s latest data center investment program report shows a Meta data center in DeKalb has 50 full-time employees, the most in the state. The average number for data centers in Illinois is 22 employees.
That’s consistent with the trend of the amount of labor data centers demand, according to a new working paper by a group of researchers from Pennsylvania State University, the University of Calgary and the National University of Singapore.
“Capital without Labor: Data Centers and the Local Economy,” has not yet been peer reviewed, but claims the local economic gains touted by developers are overblown since “local governments’ borrowing costs rise with the scale of data center development” in the form of rising municipal bond yields.
“Headline investment and projected tax revenues may overstate local economic benefits when private facilities rely on constrained public infrastructure. Approval decisions and financing arrangements should account for the capacity, financing and repayment risks borne by local utilities, taxpayers and residents,” the paper concludes. “Our findings suggest that capital investment without labor demand or production linkages generates limited economic benefits while increasing pressures on local resources and public infrastructure.”
This article appears in September 17-23, 2026.
Great news for once!
The entire Data Center issue comes down to one thing: selective wording.
We were told our rates won’t go up from the center being built, but we all know that is a lie. CyrysOne will sign a contract with CWLP and they will get locked in at a specific, lower than we pay, price point. Older, less economical and environmentally friendly stacks have been decommissioned as we embraced renewable energy sources that have now been made harder to rely on in this administration. When CyrusOne starts drawing more power from CWLP than they provide currently, they will have to fire up the older, more expensive stacks to keep up. Their selective wording says our rates won’t go up, not that we won’t pay more, so what we will see happen is our bills will be higher as we are forced to pay the rate set for these older stacks, but CWLP will point to the cost to run those extra stacks over the years and say, “But the rate didn’t go up!”
The Union support for the data center? Unions force their members who are still under an apprenticeship to attend every meeting they have, including the data center meetings. So when they say the project has Union support, what they mean is the Union leaders have been paid off to support the center after they promised they could force Union workers to show up. And don’t get me wrong, I’m 100% Pro- Union. But do we have to support every project that is done by, or claimed it will be done by, union labor? If union workers built Alligator Alcatraz, would that mean we had to support it?
The selective wording now is so similar to what we were told about the Amazon facility that it makes my mind go wild when I see people not noticing the correlation. They promise 100 permanent jobs, but only 25 seem to be in paperwork that was signed. No matter how many jobs, no where did they say these will be full-time jobs or that they will be hiring to fill them with local residents. This will be just like the Amazon facility – part time employees who can’t Unionize or get benefits, and I have to wonder what the Union leaders think about that as they lie about the Union labor support behind the project. They never say they will be hiring local to fill any positions either, so be sure that any full-time positions will be filled by CyrusOne employees who relocate.
If you think I’m reading into things too much, don’t forget what CyrusOne said when we were concerned about the water usage the data center would need- they said they won’t be using our water because they utilize an advanced air cooling process instead.
That’s air-conditioning, people. Which will use even more energy.
The leaders of Sangamon county failed us all when they didn’t force data centers to invest in the local infrastructure or generate their own power to run their facilities.