Behring Cos. wants a data center in an Oakland office building without a conditional use permit

Behring Cos. wants Oakland planners to sign a Letter of Determination that would let a ground-floor data and IT operation proceed at 415 Thomas L. Berkley Way without the conditional use permit a data center would normally face.

The four-story, 82,900-square-foot building sits in Oakland's Uptown district at 415 Thomas L. Berkley Way, also known as 415 20th Street. Its owner, an affiliate of real estate firm Behring Cos. led by Colin Behring, argues that running servers and IT gear on the ground floor is an "accessory" or "supporting" use to the "general office" use on floors two through four. Under that framing, the project would skip a conditional use permit, which would otherwise trigger a public hearing with environmental and design findings. The planning commission, not the planning department, would typically decide whether to grant a CUP, and the city's rules require findings on consistency with the general plan, on neighborhood impacts, and on fit with surrounding uses.

A Letter of Determination, by contrast, is a written confirmation from Oakland's planning department about how a use is classified under the zoning code. It does not require a public hearing. The request is therefore structured so the project can move through the lighter-confirmation process if Oakland planners agree with the "accessory use" framing. A CUP hearing is the venue where the kind of concerns the petition raises, including pollution exposure, noise, traffic, and grid load, typically land on the record. A Letter of Determination skips that step.

The owner's strongest card is the building's history. From 2000 to 2015, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, a U.S. Department of Energy research lab affiliated with the University of California, ran a roughly 20,000-square-foot supercomputer and data storage operation on the site. Behring Cos. is pointing to that fifteen-year run as evidence that a data and IT use belongs in the building without a new permit. The argument is that the proposed use is a continuation of the prior IT use, not a new data center. That framing depends on a planning question: does a smaller-scale research compute operation from 2000 still describe what would go into the same space now?

Trade coverage has framed the project as an AI compute facility. Bisnow and The Real Deal reported on the proposal this month, and the San Francisco Business Times flagged Behring Cos.'s interest in the site in December 2025. None of those outlets has identified a specific AI tenant, and the Letter of Determination request is about the use classification, not a named operator.

Opposition is already organized. The Party for Socialism and Liberation is circulating a petition against the project. Local organizer Eisa Al-Shamma told the Mercury News that the proposal should be judged by the data center industry's pollution and degradation track record, and warned the project could bring those costs to the neighborhood. The petition is the only organized community response the source identifies; broader neighborhood-association reactions are not on the record.

If Oakland signs off on the framing, the project takes the lighter path: a Letter of Determination, a written zoning-classification decision, not a public hearing. If planners disagree, the project is steered back toward a CUP process, the venue where neighbors, business groups, and city commissions could weigh in on noise, traffic, energy use, and design.

Behring Cos., on its company page, describes itself as a real estate firm focused on office and mixed-use properties, with a stated interest in "acquiring, repositioning, and operating" assets. The 415 Thomas L. Berkley Way project would be its first known data center repositioning of a former Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory site in Oakland, and one of the few cases in the city where a building owner is asking planners to bless a data use as accessory to office space rather than as a standalone data center use.

The next move sits with Oakland's planning department, which has not yet ruled on the Letter of Determination request.