A local real estate firm intends to build a data center in the heart of downtown Oakland.

Behring Cos. plans to turn a four-story, 83K SF property at 415 20th St. into a 20-megawatt data center, the San Francisco Business Times reported.

The property served as a supercomputer facility for the University of California, Berkeley, beginning in 2000. But the school moved its computing infrastructure in 2015, followed by its legacy data archives in 2019.

Hines bought the property for $63M and intended to build a 39-story office tower there, but it abandoned those plans after the pandemic upended office demand across the country.

Behring purchased the building in December as part of a larger play to create an artificial intelligence hub in downtown Oakland. The property will be used for inference computing, a growing use case for AI in which the programs analyze new data and offer suggestions or decisions rather than relying on the data they are trained on.

The building at 415 20th St. received substantial seismic retrofitting and electrical upgrades when it was renovated into a supercomputer center for Berkeley Lab, though Behring Cos. is performing additional work to increase the building’s power capabilities. More than a dozen prospective AI and robotics tenants have already toured the site, the Business Times reported.

Behring intends to create a showcase of sorts in the building's ground floor, CEO Colin Behring told the Business Times. The company is in talks with a robotics company to fill the space with a showroom.

“When you’re walking by, it’s not just another coffee shop or another salad shop or something — you’re actually going to see robots training and performing and doing what they do,” Behring told the Business Times.

Data center development is exploding across the country as firms race to keep up with the seemingly insatiable demand for AI from individuals and companies. But in many smaller cities and towns, community pushback over the projects and their voracious appetite for power and water has slowed some proposed efforts.

Robotics and AI companies are slated to lease more than 1.5M SF of Bay Area office and flex industrial space in 2026, researchers at JLL told Bisnow earlier this year. Those companies often require buildings capable of delivering high power loads of at least 4,000 amps, but less than 10% of the region’s industrial buildings are capable of accommodating those needs, JLL noted.

As San Francisco continues to expand its footprint as the global epicenter of generative artificial intelligence research and development, businesses on the physical side of AI are migrating outward to cities across the Bay Area to house advanced robotics and data center facilities. The Jeff Bezos-backed physical AI startup Project Prometheus this week leased 100K SF at 1960 Mandela Parkway in Oakland, the San Francisco Business Times reported.