A Dallas-based data center firm will take over the former Sears Holding Corp. headquarters in Hoffman Estates, ending the retailer’s 30-year history with the village.

       Compass Datacenters will most likely demolish and replace the massive structure, located on 197 acres at 3333 Beverly Road, with several data centers, high-tech facilities that provide the backbone for the internet and corporate IT operations. The firm closed on its purchase of the site Tuesday.

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       Hoffman Estates Village President Bill McLeod said it’s the perfect use for the obsolete campus near the Jane Addams Memorial Tollway, west of Illinois Route 59.

       “The reality is, it’s 2.3 million-square-feet of office space, and what are you going to fill it with?” he said. “The odds of us getting another business in there is pretty remote, and data centers are unobtrusive, have very little traffic and provide good-paying jobs.”

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       Other suburbs, including Deerfield, have explored the possibility of replacing vacant offices with logistics and warehouse operations, but McLeod said that would mean trucks, noise and pollution.

       “There was talk from some logistics companies, but we really didn’t pursue it for that location,” he said.

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       Sears moved its headquarters from Chicago’s Sears Tower, later renamed Willis Tower, more than 40 miles northwest to Hoffman Estates in 1992, joining other top firms such as McDonalds, Motorola and AT&T in choosing sprawling, suburban office campuses.

       At its height, about 5,000 employees worked in Sears’ new home, McLeod added. Restaurants, other retailers, new homes and infrastructure cropped up near the campus, transforming the village’s far western edge.

       But the decline of traditional, big-box retail led to hundreds of store closures, thousands of layoffs and a 2018 bankruptcy. In 2019, Sears and its surviving assets were purchased by Transformco, which put the corporate headquarters up for sale in 2021, the same year it shuttered the last Sears store in Illinois.

       Although data centers, which house racks of telecommunications equipment, storage systems and cooling elements, employ far fewer people than office users, McLeod said taxes eventually paid by Compass Datacenters will give village finances a big boost.

       “If they build four or five data centers, that will be $5 billion of investment,” he said. “There will be a lot of money coming into our schools.”

       Hoffman Estates scored another win in 2019, when New Jersey-based Somerset Development bought the old AT&T campus several miles east of Sears and began transforming the 150-acre site into Bell Works Chicagoland, a hub for businesses, entertainment and community events.

       The Chicago region already has more than 4.7 million square feet of data centers, such as CoreSite’s CH2 data center at 1432 S. Clinton St. in downtown Chicago, making it the nation’s third largest market after northern Virginia and Northern California, according to commercial real estate firm JLL. Chicagoland developers have another four million square feet under construction or in the planning stages, and much of it will land in the suburbs.

       “Chicago — and, for that matter, the greater national data center market — is seeing unprecedented demand for data center capacity due to cloud computing and artificial intelligence requirements,” said JLL Managing Director Andy Cvengros. “Chicago has long been an epicenter for data center growth; however, power is becoming extremely scarce with lead times of more than four years in key submarkets. As a result, we are seeing developers extend further out into new areas where power is more readily available, including Hoffman Estates and Aurora.”

       Compass Datacenters did not immediately return a message seeking comment. It has not put forward any detailed plans for the Sears site and will still need final approval from village officials.

       “They have to go through the full review process like everyone else,” McLeod said.