Chicago Trading Floor Gets Second Act Powering AI-Led Future

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(Bloomberg) — Paul R.T. Johnson still remembers the days when thousands of traders piled onto the Chicago Board of Trade’s famous trading floor wearing colorful jackets and shouting orders for everything from corn to interest-rate derivatives. 

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“You could literally ride up the escalator, and the hair on the back of your neck would stand up, you could feel the energy,” he said. 

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Now, some 30 years after he pushed for construction of the building with the world’s largest trading floor, Johnson is saying goodbye. The property at 333 South LaSalle Street — shut since the pandemic — is to be turned into an electricity substation to power everything from artificial intelligence to electric cars. The building’s interiors will be cleared out starting in the next few weeks. 

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“It’s sad in one sense, but all the trading is done elsewhere, it’s electronic,” Johnson, a former chairman of the trading floor committee, said Thursday as he took one last walk through the empty space. “And this substation will, I guess, give power to all that and other things that are going on. So I’m sad, but you know what, this is good for Chicago.”

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The conversion from a legendary but now unused trading venue to electricity hub is a sign of the times. Commonwealth Edison Co., the utility that supplies more than 4 million customers in Chicago and northern Illinois, purchased the building in 2021 after CME Group Inc., the largest US derivatives exchange, closed the trading floor for good. The SOFR options pit, the only one still alive at CME, moved to 141 West Jackson in Chicago.

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“We need additional power to be brought in the center of Chicago,” Gil Quiniones, chief executive officer of ComEd, said as he toured the former trading floor. “It’s office buildings, it’s retail establishments, and now maybe some smaller data centers.”

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Ensuring a reliable electricity supply has become key to a world where more and more people charge their phones, drive electric cars and use AI tools. Power demand, which had stagnated in the past 10 to 15 years, is now growing at an annual pace of 2% to 3%, Quiniones said. 

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Data centers currently account for about 3% to 4% of all US electricity demand, a share that’s expected to jump to as much as 12% by 2030, according to a report by McKinsey & Co. 

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In downtown Chicago, the need for electricity is expected to surge as the city has committed to decarbonize, a plan that includes a call for all its power to come from clean, renewable sources by 2035. Electric vehicle charging, the rising use of AI and small data centers — such as one being built in the former Cboe Global Markets Inc. headquarters nearby — are also adding to the load.

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“We evaluated nine sites because we were projecting that the electrical load in the central business district of Chicago will be growing,” Quiniones said. “And this, by far, was the best site, because it’s right in the middle of where that load growth will happen.”

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The property is adjacent to the iconic CBOT building, the landmark known for its statue of Ceres, goddess of grain. The pit building is a behemoth with 250,000 square feet (23,200 square meters), and it housed some 5,000 people in its heyday. The trading floor alone is so large that a Boeing Co. 747 jetliner could be parked there, Johnson said.