The Behring Company is pitching a former Berkeley Lab supercomputing building at 415 20th Street as an Oakland AI data-center hub. By the CEO's own numbers, the compute is about 1.5% of the campus — and the building was bought out of the office crash for $6.8 million.

The Behring Company says it will turn a four-story building at 415 20th Street in Uptown Oakland into "a data center and AI infrastructure hub," a plan first reported Tuesday by the San Francisco Business Times and confirmed by the developer on LinkedIn. The building, Behring notes, once housed a supercomputer for Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and carries an active 4.5-megawatt power allocation with a path to 20 megawatts — enough, CEO Colin Behring says, to "bypass multi-year grid interconnect delays."

Read the developer's own numbers and the headline shrinks. Behring told the Business Times the AI infrastructure component is roughly 20,000 square feet — "about 1.5%" — of a planned 1.3-million-square-foot campus he calls 1900 Broadway. The other 98.5% is housing, office and research space. This is an office landlord attaching the word "AI" to a distressed building, not a hyperscale data center.

The cap table makes the repositioning plain. Hines bought 415 20th in 2019 for about $63 million and won approval in 2021 for a 39-story office tower, then halted it in 2023 when East Bay office vacancy neared 37%, calling it "not economically feasible." Behring acquired the dead site for $6.8 million — roughly $81 a square foot, per The Real Deal. The traction so far is Behring's own claim of "more than 15 tours" by AI and robotics groups over two weeks. No signed tenant has been named, and no new city entitlement for a data-center use has been announced.

Behring knows this market: it completed the 452-unit 1900 Broadway tower next door in 2024, then got sued by its contractor for $20 million over delays. Whether 415 20th becomes compute space or stays a marketing line depends on a tenant lease and a power upgrade that don't yet exist. Watch for a signed anchor and a permit filing — until then, this is a pitch deck, not a data center.