Data center real estate investor Daniel English on converting an empty Chicago office tower into a 50-megawatt AI data center

Converting dead office space into AI infrastructure

Daniel English has spent 15 years building a thesis that most private equity laughed at: own the infrastructure the digital world runs on. Legacy Investments started with data centers and e-commerce warehouses when almost no one in real estate took either seriously. The AI buildout has since vindicated that bet more dramatically than he could have anticipated.

The density shift

The clearest sign of how much the market has changed is in the numbers. In 2010, a five-megawatt data center was considered strong; 30 megawatts was peak. Today, 30 megawatts is small, and everyone wants a gigawatt. English's typical deal now runs $600 million per project, which he describes as a small data center investment.

That density shift is what makes urban adaptive reuse viable in a way it wasn't before. Legacy bought the Chicago Board of Options Exchange building on LaSalle Street and is converting it into a 50-megawatt AI data center inside roughly 40,000 square feet. In 2010, the same building might have yielded four megawatts. The physics haven't changed; the hardware density has.

“I converted a glass office tower in Downtown Minneapolis into a large AI data center... Our typical deal is $600,000,000 just each. So that's a small data center investment... I bought the Chicago Board of Options Exchange building on LaSalle Street downtown, and we're turning that into a large AI data center right now — I can put 50 megawatts in about 40,000 square feet in that building today.”

The Minneapolis proof of concept

Legacy converted a glass office tower in Downtown Minneapolis into a large AI data center, and the building recently sold for the highest price of any building in Minnesota. English says it was effectively worthless as a mostly vacant office asset, carrying less than $30 million in value before conversion. The sale price isn't disclosed, but English frames the gap as dramatic. The building still looks like a glass office tower from the street.

That case sits at the center of his community relations argument: property tax revenue jumps, hundreds of millions in tenant infrastructure investment flows in, and the building doesn't look like a prison or consume large amounts of water. He says communities are increasingly making direct asks for ancillary benefits — fire stations, housing, school funding — on top of the tax uplift, and Legacy has been accommodating those requests.

Site selection

English's site selection logic is straightforward: power infrastructure first, fiber second, then latency. Water used to be a significant variable, but he says most of what Legacy is building today uses closed-loop systems with minimal water consumption. Downtown locations like Chicago and Minneapolis are attractive precisely because the fiber density and power infrastructure are already in place, and latency to end users is lower.

Speculative capital deployment

Legacy is not building to suit. English is clear that these deals involve risking capital before a tenant is in tow — at a scale where the low end is $500 million and the high end is $10 billion per project. Hyperscalers, neo-clouds, and even video game companies are competing for the same limited supply. English describes the tenant relationships as partnership-oriented given the mutual scale of investment, but the development risk sits with Legacy and its capital partners.

Community design

Legacy is also working on a greenfield data center in Texas where the architecture team designed fencing with aesthetics closer to a Frank Gehry museum than a utility compound. English floats the idea of wrapping data center construction projects in large-scale art installations, pointing to Louis Vuitton's giant trunk wrap on Fifth Avenue as a model. He says Legacy has projects in the works in Chicago that move in that direction.

The commercial logic and the aesthetic ambition are the same bet: if data centers can look like infrastructure people accept or even want, the political and community friction that now constrains supply gets easier to manage.