# Data center might get tucked away inside downtown Oakland office site > Source: > Published: 2026-08-14 02:40:29+00:00 **Getting your** [Trinity Audio](//trinityaudio.ai)player ready...OAKLAND — A data center and artificial intelligence complex might appear on one of the floors of a downtown Oakland office building under a plan that seeks to launch the tech hub without gaining a key city permit. The computing complex would operate inside an office building at 415 Thomas L. Berkley Way, also known as 415 20th St., in downtown Oakland’s hip and trendy Uptown neighborhood, city planning documents show. The building owner who is proposing the tech hub hopes to skirt some permit requirements since the complex was a [long-time supercomputing operation](https://www.nersc.gov/news-and-events/news/berkeley-lab-dedicates-first-oakland-city-facility) for Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. “We respectfully request a letter of determination confirming that the owner’s proposed continued use of the property conforms to the site’s zoning and general plan designations and may proceed without a conditional use permit,” Colin Behring, chief executive officer of the business affiliate that officially owns the building, wrote in a letter to city planners. The four-story office building totals 82,900 square feet, according to city public records. An “information technology” and “data” site would operate on the first floor of the building and would be a “supporting use” of the tenant operations within the structure. The computing level of the building would provide “building support and tenant amenity” uses and would function as an “accessory” to the office uses in the structure. The proposal states that the remaining three floors of the building above the ground-floor tech-oriented site would be devoted to “general office” uses. The office operations on floors two, three and four were described as “principal uses” in the building. The building is currently classified as a “general office” use, the city planning files show. For several years, massive computing operations at hyper speeds were a primary feature of the relatively nondescript Oakland structure. From 2000 to 2015, the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory operated a supercomputer and data storage complex totaling 20,000 square feet at 415 20th St., which was the building’s address at the time. Word that a data operation might rev up within the building prompted the Party for Socialism and Liberation, a revolutionary communist political organization, to circulate a petition to oppose the proposal. “Data centers leave behind this track record of pollution and degradation,” Eisa Al-Shamma, an organizer with the group, said in an interview with this news organization. “They have negative impacts on the communities that they are put in.” When the Berkeley Lab opened its supercomputing center inside the building, the site accommodated an IBM device that at the time was the world’s most powerful unclassified supercomputer. At 20,700 square feet, the data center would equate to 1.5% of the total size of the multibuilding complex of offices, retail and other commercial spaces totaling 1.4 million square feet that Behring hopes will be an innovation hub for downtown Oakland. “The (415 Thomas L. Berkley Way) property’s established prior use as a data and research facility (Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory) supports the conclusion that the proposed use is a continuation of a long-standing use at the site rather than a new or intensified one,” Behring wrote in the letter to Oakland planners.