Behring Companies Plans AI Data Center in Downtown Oakland

Behring Companies, an East Bay developer, has unveiled plans for a 20,000-square-foot AI data center in downtown Oakland, California. The facility will be situated at 415 20th Street, a former supercomputer site above the 19th Street BART Station, which Behring acquired last December for $6.8 million. The developer intends to repurpose the building's existing 20-megawatt power infrastructure, originally designed for heavy computing by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, to accommodate dense AI workloads without extensive new grid upgrades.

The data center is designed to support AI and robotics research at Stack Ventures' 1.3-million-square-foot "innovation campus" at 1900 Broadway, which includes housing and offices. Behring Companies, which also owns nearby office buildings and a parking garage used by Tesla's autonomous vehicle fleet, anticipates leasing the data center space to a single entity or multiple tenants. The company has already conducted 15 tours for prospective tenants, including robotics companies, AI research labs, and cloud providers.

The project has elicited varied responses from Oakland residents. While some residents expressed openness to new jobs and investment, others raised significant environmental concerns regarding the data center's energy consumption. One resident on Reddit voiced worries about rising energy costs and referred to the facility as an "energy sucking polluter." Conversely, some residents argued that repurposing an existing high-capacity computing infrastructure constitutes a minimal change of use, though others pointed out the surrounding area is now a mixed commercial and residential neighborhood, unlike its previous industrial context.

Behring Companies has not yet provided a timeline for the data center's completion but indicated that further details would be released soon.