Overview
- Behring Companies unveiled plans Tuesday to convert 415 20th St. in downtown Oakland into a data center designed for AI inference workloads with a target capacity of 20 megawatts.
- The property once housed a Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory supercomputer and received earlier seismic and electrical upgrades that Behring says reduce some retrofit needs while further power work is planned to reach 20 MW.
- More than a dozen AI and robotics firms have toured the building as Behring markets the site as infrastructure to support research and testing at the nearby Stack Ventures innovation campus.
- Local reactions are mixed, with some residents welcoming jobs and downtown investment and others raising concerns about heavy electricity and water use and the project’s environmental footprint.
- The proposal arrives as Bay Area demand for high‑power buildings rises and available industrial stock with large electrical capacity is scarce, which could push more AI and robotics development into cities like Oakland.