Goldman Said to Pause CyrusOne Bond Sale After CME Thanksgiving Datacenter O...

Goldman Sachs Group Inc. has reportedly suspended a planned $1.3 billion mortgage-bond sale for CyrusOne, the datacenter operator behind CME Group Inc.'s primary hub, following a massive outage that crippled one of the world's largest derivatives exchanges over Thanksgiving weekend.

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The bank had been managing what would have been CyrusOne's largest-ever commercial mortgage bond sale, with early feedback due on November 25. Days later, CME's global markets went dark for more than 10 hours due to cooling system failure at the Aurora, Illinois facility, which serves as the backbone for trillions of dollars of derivatives traded daily.

The refinancing deal for CyrusOne, owned by private equity (PE) company KKR & Co. and infrastructure investment fund Global Infrastructure Partners (GIP), is now on hold after being meant to price this week, Bloomberg on Thursday cited people familiar with the matter, who asked not to be named because the information isn't public. The transaction may be revived in the first quarter, the people said.

The debt was secured by a campus of three datacenters in Aurora, about 35 miles outside downtown Chicago. CME represented about 14% of the underwritten total rent on the deal, making it the second-largest customer at the campus. Representatives for Goldman, GIP and KKR declined to comment. Spokespeople for CyrusOne and CME didn't respond to requests for comment.

Critical Infrastructure Failure Exposes AI Investment Risk

The equipment failure has become a wake-up call for investors who've piled hundreds of billions of dollars into the artificial intelligence (AI) datacenter boom, serving as a reminder that facilities' lease agreements are, in fact, breakable. Termination clauses are baked into many of them in the event of multiple recurring outages.

CyrusOne's suburban Chicago datacenter said it has bolstered its backup cooling capacity after the overheating that caused Friday's meltdown. Temperatures at the complex soared to over 100F (38C) during the outage, despite frigid weather outside, reported Blooomberg Thursday.

While CME's disaster recovery plan calls for a move to a datacenter in the New York area, the exchange opted against switching to a backup facility because the information it had suggested that the outage at the Aurora site would be brief, Bloomberg previously reported. Instead, the disruption resulted in one of the longest unplanned outages at CME in recent history.

Governance Gaps in Modern Datacenter Operations

Sanchit Vir Gogia, chief analyst at Greyhound Research, described the CME outage as "a case study in how a single physical failure inside a datacenter can escalate into a global market disruption when governance, failover logic, and environmental engineering are not aligned with the realities of modern infrastructure."

The fundamental issue wasn't just that a cooling plant malfunction knocked out multiple chillers simultaneously, but that backup systems failed to operate independently, Gogia said. The rapid temperature spike made it impossible for CME to keep matching engines online, and thermal failures escalated within minutes rather than unfolding on traditional disaster recovery timelines.

John Annand, senior technical counselor at Info-Tech Research Group, said the incident highlighted risk management failures in plan execution. "At some point, the CME Group Incident Commander decided that rather than failing over to their secondary site, it was better to let CyrusOne continue to attempt to fix the problem primarily," he said. "That choice turned what might have been a minor disruption into an open-ended outage lasting some 10 hours."

PE-Owned Datacenter Under Scrutiny

The Aurora complex, which handles at least $25 quadrillion of notional trade volume daily by one 2018 estimate, dates back to 2009 when CME started building the facility. In 2016, CME sold the site to Dallas-based CyrusOne and agreed to rent space for 15 years, outsourcing day-to-day operations.

In 2021, KKR and Global Infrastructure Partners bought CyrusOne in a deal worth roughly $11.4 billion, capitalizing on surging AI-driven datacenter demand. According to CyrusOne's website, the datacenter features additional chiller units to protect against failures, raising questions about what went wrong last week.

Thomas Solelhac, a partner at EY-Parthenon, suggested the cooling failure might indicate a design issue. "Normally, in datacenters of this type, there is a lot of redundancy to avoid this kind of problem with power and cooling," he said.