About a-team Marketing Services
The knowledge platform for the financial technology industry
The knowledge platform for the financial technology industry

A-Team Insight Blogs

CME’s Aurora Co-Lo: Quick Facts

Subscribe to our newsletter

The Chicago Mercantile Exchange opened its new data centre – housing the Globex matching engine – in August, 2010. Now it’s planning to add co-location services, beginning January 29, 2012. Here’s some more information …

– The data centre is located in Aurora, IL – 40 miles west of the city.

– It is a 428,000+ square foot facility (by comparison, NYSE Euronext’s Mahwah liquidity centre is 400,000 square feet), with two 138,000 volt power sources.  92 megawatts of redundant power is available.

– Low-latency connectivity to Globex is via the internal GLink network, with all connections equidistant to provide equality of access.

– GLink is available at 1 and 10 gigabit per second connections, though inbound rate for both is limited to 1 gigabit.

– Cross connects (between trading firms and third party vendors) within the facility are allowed, and access to GPS antena for latency monitoring/time synchronisation are available.

– Some suggest that pricing will be between $15,000 and $19,000 per month for a 52U rack. Plus a $10,000 deposit per rack.

– Bulk Transport is the name given to a fibre optic connection back to the old matching and co-lo centre at 350 East Cermak Street in Chicago proper. Intercontinental Exchange is there, as is Equinix’s data centre and Telx.

– A number of third party connectivity providers are expected to connect into Aurora. The current approved list of providers comprises: AboveNet, AT&T, Hudson Fibre Network, Level 3 Communications, NTT Communications, Sidera Networks and Verizon.

– Not on the CME’s list today, Anova Technologies’ CEO Mike Persico says the company plans to provide the fastest route between Aurora and 350 East Cermak.

– Spread Networks, which operates the fastest network between 350 East Cermak and various endpoints in the NYC metro region has already stated it does not plan to link directly into Aurora.

Subscribe to our newsletter

Related content

WEBINAR

Upcoming Webinar: Reviewing the Latency Landscape and the Next Generation of Ultra-Low Latency Infrastructure

Date: 17 September 2026 Time: 10:00am ET / 3:00pm London / 4:00pm CET Duration: 50 minutes Ultra-low latency is no longer the preserve of a handful of proprietary trading firms. As new asset classes electronify, data volumes surge, and regulatory expectations around execution quality and resilience tighten, the performance demands on trading infrastructure are broadening...

BLOG

Celebrating Excellence at the TradingTech Insight Awards Europe 2026

The pace of change across trading technology shows no sign of slowing. As markets become more complex, data-intensive and performance-driven, firms are rethinking how infrastructure, analytics and execution workflows interconnect across the trading lifecycle. Against this backdrop, the TradingTech Insight Awards Europe 2026 brought the industry together to recognise the solution providers delivering measurable impact...

EVENT

AI in Data Management Summit New York City

Following the success of the 15th Data Management Summit NYC, A-Team Group are excited to announce our new event: AI in Data Management Summit NYC!

GUIDE

Entity Data Management Handbook – Fifth Edition

Welcome to the fifth edition of A-Team Group’s Entity Data Management Handbook, sponsored for the fourth year running by entity data specialist Bureau van Dijk, a Moody’s Analytics Company. The past year has seen a crackdown on corporate responsibility for financial crime – with financial firms facing draconian fines for non-compliance and the very real...