Overview
- In mid-August Behring Companies submitted plans to use roughly 20,000–20,700 square feet of the four-story building at 415 20th St. as a data facility with up to 20 megawatts of capacity.
- The building housed Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory’s supercomputing operations for more than 20 years, and the developer and Councilmember Carroll Fife say the proposal is a continuation of that technical use rather than a typical third-party hyperscale data center.
- The data facility is one component of a larger 1.4 million square-foot innovation campus the developer has pitched for downtown Oakland and that Behring says could generate up to 2,300 jobs across the full project.
- The submission is in an early stage and has been sent to Oakland city staff, and the project may avoid additional approvals if city review finds it conforms to prior Lawrence Lab uses while Fife develops local responsible-AI rules.
- Local residents and organized groups have launched petitions and meetings to oppose the plan over energy, water, jobs and environmental concerns, and community pushback could shape city policy decisions and set a local example in the wider debate over AI data‑center siting.