RESOLVING THE LEDGER
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A proposed project in the heart of downtown Oakland, referred to by some as a data center, is raising concerns about its environmental impact and actual economic benefits, but the developer insists it is not a data center.
Behring Companies said it’s planning to convert some 20,000 square feet of a building on 20th Street into what it calls an innovation campus.
“Data center is typically a bunch of racks and computers for outside parties,” Colin Behring said. “It’s dark. There’s no people in it. That’s not what we can do here.”
Behring said the facility could provide computing power for AI, robotics and other tech startups as part of a larger innovation campus surrounding the 19th Street BART station.
The building has a history of housing computers. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory once operated a federal supercomputing facility at the site, which Behring said makes it easier to convert the building to house shelves of memory-rich computers now. Many call that a data center, and they have questions about the environmental footprint along with water and power usage.
Behring said that wouldn’t be a problem with their center.
“California produces so much power that we actually throw away like 3.5 million megawatts of solar and other clean energy every single year because we can’t even store it,” Behring said.
District 3 Councilmember Carroll Fife organized a community meeting Friday to let people question the developer directly. Fife said she wants to make sure there are benefits to the average Oakland resident.
“We know of all of the concerns that have happened across the country with these large-scale mega facilities coming into low-income communities, people of color communities that don’t have the resources to push back,” she said.
Fife said the Oakland Planning and Building Department received Behring’s proposal a week ago for an AI campus.
“I want it to be absolutely, critically clear that this is not the large-scale mega facility that people have expressed,” Fife said.
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