CyrusOne's New Data Center: What You Need to Know

CyrusOne doesn’t pick sites casually. The company operates dozens of facilities across North America and Europe, managing infrastructure for Fortune 500 clients who can't afford downtime measured in seconds, let alone hours. So when CyrusOne targets a location like Talkington Township — roughly 30 miles outside Springfield — it’s worth paying attention to what that signal means for the region and the broader data center market.

The problem is that reliable details on this project remain thin. What we can do is work with what’s confirmed, layer in what we know about how CyrusOne operates, and give you a grounded read on what a development like this typically means for a community and a market.

Who CyrusOne Is and Why Their Site Selections Matter

CyrusOne sits in the upper tier of colocation data center operators globally. The company was taken private in a $15 billion acquisition by KKR and Global Infrastructure Partners in 2022 — a transaction that gave it the capital runway to accelerate development without the quarterly earnings pressure of public markets. Since then, the company has been quietly aggressive about expanding its footprint, particularly in markets where land is available, power is accessible, and fiber connectivity can be established.

Their site selection process isn’t arbitrary — it’s a checklist that most rural and exurban markets fail, which is exactly why when a location clears that checklist, it tends to move fast.

Data center operators at CyrusOne’s scale are looking for a specific combination: access to high-capacity power transmission infrastructure, low natural disaster risk, fiber network proximity, and increasingly, access to water for cooling systems or the ability to deploy air-cooled alternatives. Zoning flexibility and local government receptiveness matter too. One resistant county commission can delay a project by years.

Talkington Township: Why 30 Miles From Springfield Is a Feature, Not a Bug

The instinct when hearing "30 miles from downtown Springfield" might be to wonder why a company wouldn’t want to be closer to the urban core. That instinct misreads how modern data center site selection actually works.

Proximity to a metro like Springfield matters for fiber connectivity and client accessibility — but being *in* the city creates problems. Urban land is expensive, power infrastructure in dense areas is often already strained, and zoning battles in established neighborhoods can be brutal. Talkington Township’s location hits what the industry calls the "edge-adjacent" sweet spot: close enough to benefit from regional infrastructure networks, far enough to access cheaper land and more cooperative permitting environments.

There’s also a risk diversification logic at play — hyperscalers and colocation operators actively avoid clustering facilities too close to each other or to client campuses because geographic separation is itself a form of redundancy.

For the Springfield region specifically, a CyrusOne facility at this distance would likely tap into existing transmission lines running through the area while benefiting from lower land acquisition costs per acre. Data centers at the scale CyrusOne typically builds — think 100MW+ campuses when fully built out — require significant acreage, and that kind of footprint simply isn’t available or financially viable in established urban areas.

What This Means Economically for the Region

Data center projects have a well-documented economic pattern that plays out in phases. Construction is the first wave: heavy civil work, electrical infrastructure, mechanical systems, and fiber installation typically employ hundreds of workers over 18 to 36 months depending on scale. These aren’t minimum-wage jobs — skilled electricians, project managers, and specialized contractors in this sector command significant wages.

The second wave is more nuanced. Operational headcount at a data center is surprisingly lean relative to the facility’s economic footprint. A 100MW facility might run day-to-day with 50 to 150 direct employees. What that understates, though, is the downstream effect on local utilities (who gain a massive, predictable revenue customer), on fiber providers who need to extend or upgrade runs to the site, and on ancillary businesses serving the workforce.

The third effect — and this one gets less attention — is the property tax impact. Data centers carry enormous assessed values relative to their land footprint, and many municipalities have negotiated significant tax contributions from these facilities that fund schools, roads, and emergency services. It’s not uncommon for a single large data center to become one of the top five taxpayers in a county within a few years of opening.

That said, communities should go in clear-eyed. Data centers consume enormous amounts of power and water, and those demands land on local utilities and infrastructure systems that may not be sized for them. Grid upgrades, water supply considerations, and road improvements to handle construction traffic are real costs that need to be negotiated carefully in development agreements.

How Talkington Township Fits the Broader Data Center Site Selection Trend

The Talkington Township project — if it proceeds at the scale CyrusOne typically targets — fits squarely into a market-wide shift that’s been accelerating since 2022. Demand for data center capacity is growing faster than the established major markets (Northern Virginia, Phoenix, Dallas, Chicago) can absorb it. Power constraints in particular have become the binding limitation in those markets, with some hyperscale users facing multi-year wait times for utility interconnection.

That pressure is pushing operators to look seriously at secondary and tertiary markets in ways they never did before. Five years ago, a project in a township 30 miles from a mid-sized Midwestern city would have been considered fringe. Now it’s competitive.

CyrusOne’s competitors — Equinix, Iron Mountain, Switch, and a growing roster of hyperscale-focused developers — are running the same playbook. The question for any specific site isn’t just whether it can host a data center today, but whether the regional grid can support the full buildout the operator envisions over a 10-to-15-year campus expansion.

That long-horizon thinking is why CyrusOne’s interest in Talkington Township matters beyond the immediate project. If the infrastructure case holds, this doesn’t stay a single building — it becomes a campus, and campuses have compounding regional effects.

What Stakeholders Should Watch Next

A few things will determine whether this project accelerates or stalls.

Power is the critical path. CyrusOne will need to work with regional utilities to establish what transmission capacity exists, what upgrades are required, and who bears the cost of those upgrades. That negotiation often happens quietly and early, and its outcome shapes everything else.

Zoning and local government alignment matters almost as much. Townships that roll out the welcome mat with pre-negotiated development agreements, streamlined permitting, and clear communication about community benefit expectations tend to attract faster investment. Those that don’t signal readiness often watch projects migrate to the next site on the list.

For local landowners, businesses, and workforce development organizations, the window to position for this project is now — before construction contracts are awarded and hiring pipelines are established. Data center developers at this scale often commit to local hiring targets and regional vendor preferences as part of community agreements, but those commitments have to be negotiated before ground breaks.

The data center sector is moving at a pace that’s genuinely difficult to overstate right now. Artificial intelligence workloads are driving demand curves that didn’t exist three years ago, and operators like CyrusOne are racing to site, permit, and build capacity before their competitors. Talkington Township may be 30 miles from the nearest city center — but in the current market, that’s closer to the action than it looks.

[INTERNAL LINK: CyrusOne operations]

[INTERNAL LINK: data center economic impact]

[INTERNAL LINK: site selection trends]

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