A 2.4 million-square-foot iconic office building, largely vacant and underutilised for years, was once owned by a £6.4 billion company.

The Hoffman Estates was home to the former Sears corporate headquarters campus, which was located in the suburbs in Cook County, Illinois.

The massive office complex in Hoffman Estates became symbolic of Sears's rise and fall as a retail giant.

It housed Sears Holdings Corporation for decades before the company downsized following its bankruptcy and eventual acquisition by Transformco.

The old Sears, Roebuck, and Co. corporate headquarters in the northwest suburban Hoffman Estates filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2018.

It was acquired by Compass Datacenters in September 2024, and a new data center will be built on the site.

Prior to this acquisition, the building had beenm left "abandoned" and even featured in a viral YouTube video.

At its height, Sears was a dominant force in retail, but its decline can be attributed to factors such as poor management, shifting consumer preferences, and the rise of online and big-box competitors like Amazon and Walmart.

Despite a 2005 merger with Kmart, efforts to revitalise the brand proved ineffective, and both companies have continued to struggle.

Many former Sears stores have been repurposed for different uses as the company has liquidated assets.

In 2023, the sprawling property was sold to Compass Datacenters for £150 million ($194 million), marking a shift in the building's use from retail corporate offices to cutting-edge data centers.

This sale was part of a broader trend of repurposing corporate office spaces into data storage facilities, catering to growing demands from cloud computing and artificial intelligence.

Compass CEO Chris Crosby had earlier said: "This will be a center of economics - a different world of economics, but the center of economics for a very long time. "

The company later announced plans to build five hyperscale data centers, each expected to span over 250,000 square feet.