A real estate firm is planning to develop a data center in Oakland, California.

First reported by BizJournal, real estate firm Behring Cos. is planning to convert 415 20th Street into a 20MW data center.

The four-story facility was once a supercomputer facility for the Lawrence Berkeley National Labs, known as the Oakland Scientific Facility, but is now vacant.

Currently offering 4.5MW, Behring said it is renovating the site and boosting its power offering to be used for dense AI compute. The site could host one tenant or several.

“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.”

In the weeks since Behring has started marketing the property, there have been 15 tours from robotics companies, research and lab AI companies, and cloud providers, it said.

Behring is a privately-owned real estate investment firm based in California. Founded in 2013, it is traditionally focused on multi-family real estate assets, with some $350 million in assets under management.

The company acquired the vacant 83,000-square-foot (7,710 sqm) office building from Hines in December for $6.8m. Hines reportedly paid $36m to acquire the site in 2019 from the University of California Regents.

Hines had hoped to build a 39-story, 800,000 sq ft (74,322 sqm) office tower, but dropped the plans in 2023, saying it was “not economically feasible to develop in the current market.”

Hines then tried to offer the property to BART during its search for a new police headquarters, but the rail operator opted for a different building.

The National Science Facility hosted hardware for the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) from around 2001, performing a major retrofit to install an IBM RS/6000 SP supercomputer and a Cray T3E system, as well as several other clusters.

Online sources suggest the data center portion was exited around 2015, while the university continued to occupy the office portion of the site until at least 2020. Much of the ground floor is still configured as raised-floor data center space, totaling more than 20,000 sq ft (1,858 sqm).

While California is a major data center market, most facilities are located in San Jose, with smaller hubs around Sacramento, San Diego, and San Francisco. Digital Realty operates its OAK10 facility in Oakland at 720 2nd Street.