Old Berkeley Lab site in Oakland becomes an AI hub

Behring Companies bought this Oakland office tower for just $6.8 million last December. Nobody wanted a downtown office building in the middle of a slump. Now the company is carving out part of it for AI computers instead. It's a cheap, fast way into the data center business.

Behring calls it an "innovation campus" meant to pull robotics and AI companies into downtown Oakland. But the building only offers 20 megawatts of power today. That's tiny next to the gigawatt-scale campuses AI giants are building elsewhere. Oakland has already seen pushback against AI data centers before, from neighbors worried about noise, water use, and strained power.

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Will Oakland's residents welcome this the way Behring hopes? The building sits in a dense, walkable part of downtown, not an industrial park. Data centers usually go where neighbors are far away and land is cheap. If this one gets built anyway, it could test whether AI infrastructure can move into city centers without a fight.