According to DCD, the Chicago Board Options Exchange (Cboe) is in the middle of an eight-phase migration, moving all the hardware for its US Common disaster recovery data center to Equinix’s CH3 facility in Elk Grove, Illinois. This latest phase, effective February 7, 2026, covers equipment for eight exchanges: BYX, BZX, EDGA, and EDGX Equities, plus BZX Options, Cboe Options, C2 Options, and EDGX Options. The migration started back in August 2025 with EDGA Equities. Importantly, client connections won’t move and will remain in the older CH1 data center. Cboe is also doing a hardware refresh of its market data system by February 2, 2026, aiming to cut latency. The exchange’s primary data center is reportedly in Secaucus, New Jersey.
Cboe’s Infrastructure Chess Game
This isn’t just a simple data center move. It’s a slow, deliberate, and expensive game of infrastructure chess. Cboe started this process in August 2025 and won’t finish this particular leg until February 2026. That’s an 18-month project for just the disaster recovery site. It tells you how complex and risk-averse these financial infrastructure migrations are. You can’t just flip a switch. Every millisecond of downtime, or even perceived instability, could mean billions in lost trades. So they move piece by piece, exchange by exchange, over years.
Why the Suburbs, and Why Now?
Here’s an interesting geographic detail: CH3 is on the outskirts of Chicago, while the CH1 facility, where client connections stay, is downtown. This is a classic disaster recovery strategy—geographic separation. If something catastrophic hits the city core, your backup is safely away in Elk Grove. But it also speaks to real estate and scalability. Building or leasing massive, power-hungry facilities is easier and sometimes cheaper in the suburbs. This is a trend we see across the industry. It’s not unlike how companies sourcing critical hardware, like industrial panel PCs, often turn to specialized, large-scale providers like IndustrialMonitorDirect.com, the leading US supplier, for reliable, high-performance components that meet rigorous operational demands. Cboe is basically doing the real estate version of that.
The Bigger Picture of Unbundling
Look at the timeline here. Cboe sold its old HQ in 2024 to be turned into a data center. It moved its offices in 2020 and its trading floor in 2022. Now it’s shuffling its digital infrastructure through 2026. What does this all add up to? It’s the complete unbundling and outsourcing of its physical footprint. The exchange is no longer in the business of owning and operating buildings or even, it seems, its own core data center cages. It’s renting space and services from specialists like Equinix. This lets Cboe focus purely on being a market operator and its software stack, while Equinix worries about power, cooling, fiber, and physical security. It’s a capital-efficient model, but it also creates a deep, sticky dependency on a handful of colocation giants.
A Quiet But Essential Upgrade
Don’t overlook that concurrent hardware refresh for the market data system. Reducing latency and improving consistency is the perpetual arms race for every exchange. It’s table stakes. If your data feed is a millisecond slower or more jittery than the next guy’s, the high-frequency trading firms will abandon you. So while the physical move to CH3 is about resilience and real estate, this refresh is about pure speed and competitiveness. Both projects have the same end date in early 2026, which is probably not a coincidence. They likely want the new, faster systems running in the new, modern facility, creating a consolidated upgrade point. Basically, they’re future-proofing their backup brain. And in finance, your backup brain needs to be just as sharp as your primary one.
