O’Hare industrial construction outlook
December 29, 2025 — What’s ahead for industrial construction in the O’Hare submarket? Manufacturing, e-commerce and logistics space remains important to this key Chicago submarket, but recent construction has shifted to data centers. These large scale facilities support a variety of digital networking, storage and related needs.
There is 1.5 million square feet of industrial construction underway in the O’Hare industrial submarket. A significant portion of the space is allocated for data centers, a notable shift in demand as companies look to support the data needs of large scale entities. CoStar research notes that the top data center projects under development in Elk Grove Village:
- Prime Data Centers’ three- building, 1 million-square-foot, 175-megawatt data center campus in Elk Grove Village, the second largest data center market in the country. This project, known as Prime ORD, comes with a $1 billion investment and is set to become the largest data center campus in Greater Chicago.
- Aligned Data Centers’ two-building, 1 million-square-foot campus near O’Hare International Airport. This is a $285 million investment and will have up to 96 MW of capacity.
- STACK Infrastructure’s 263,000- square-foot, two-story facility being built within Elk Grove Village’s Fortune Business Campus. This facility will provide 36 MW optimized for AI and cloud workloads.
O’Hare Industrial Fundamentals
The O’Hare submarket has an overall vacancy rate of 5.4%. New inventory could attract tenants seeking enhanced amenities such as 34’+ clear heights and heavy power capacity. Conversely, the submarket is also recording -1.1 million square feet of absorption. This indicates that additional distribution facilities may be compounding existing demand challenges.
Tenants are still cautious about long-term space commitments as they consider current economic conditions. And, capital for commercial real estate development has tightened across much of the country. Despite this, O’Hare’s proximity to its namesake airport, major highways, and residential centers continues to support its appeal across the industrial, manufacturing, logistics and, of course, data center sectors. CoStar notes that the shift in demand from logistics to data centers could help reverse the recent absorption slump as new inventory comes online.
