Former LBNL Supercomputing Site in Oakland Slated for 20MW Data Center

A real estate firm is planning to convert a former supercomputing facility in Oakland, California, into a 20MW data center. First reported by BizJournal, Behring Cos. plans to redevelop 415 20th Street, a four-story building that once housed the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory’s Oakland Scientific Facility. The vacant site currently has 4.5MW of power capacity. Behring is upgrading the facility to support high-density AI computing, with space for either a single tenant or multiple tenants.

“It’s going to be one of the most capable AI inference compute facilities in the inner Bay Area,” Behring told BJ. “It offers a much more convenient and much more heavy utility-type space that’s directly on BART, it’s accessible, it’s super close to San Francisco.”

Since Behring began marketing the property, it has hosted 15 tours with robotics firms, AI research companies, and cloud providers. Founded in 2013, Behring is a California-based real estate investment firm with about $350 million in assets under management. Behring bought the vacant 83,000-square-foot building from Hines in December for $6.8 million. Hines had acquired it for $36 million in 2019 and later abandoned plans for a 39-story office tower, citing unfavorable market conditions. BART also considered the site for its police headquarters but chose another location.

The facility housed NERSC computing hardware from around 2001, including IBM and Cray supercomputers and other clusters. The data center operations reportedly ended around 2015, while the office space remained in use until at least 2020. More than 20,000 square feet of the ground floor still features raised-floor data center space. California is a major data center market, with most facilities concentrated in San Jose and smaller hubs in Sacramento, San Diego, and San Francisco. Digital Realty also operates the OAK10 facility in Oakland.