A real estate developer purchased a vacant building in Oakland and has announced that he intends to build a data center. That alone is enough to raise alarms these days, but the fact that he wants to do it in the middle of downtown has some people worried about the future.
The vacant four-story building at the corner of Franklin and 20th in Oakland is no stranger to technology. Before it closed, it housed a supercomputer for the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory with a 20-megawatt power capacity. And that was just what CEO Colin Behring was looking for.
His company built a 38-story luxury apartment building on the same block, with the bottom two floors devoted to a high-tech workspace called “STAK.” The idea is for tech workers to live and work in the same building. In a statement to the San Francisco Financial Times, Behring said, “In an era where AI and high-performance computing are reshaping every industry, that legacy presents a strategic advantage as we expand the STAK Ventures ecosystem and deepen our ties to the venture and technology communities.”…