A $54.5 million data center is going up at McClellan Park

Drive up AK Street inside McClellan Park, the business park on the old McClellan Air Force Base, and you pass Prime Data Centers' first Sacramento building, which opened in 2020. Sacramento County has now cleared the one next to it.

The county's permit feed lists CBNC2025-00334 at 2415 AK St. as a "new data center building and generator building," 130,911 square feet, valued at $54.5 million. It was filed December 18, 2025 and issued September 10, 2026, and the county's status now reads "Plan Review - Allow Inspection," meaning construction can proceed while a handful of follow-up drawings are still in review. The project name on the permit is "SMF01.02 Data Center." A separate permit at 2410 AK St. asks for a single-story administrative office "for data center campus," valued at $10 million.

That makes McClellan the Sacramento region's answer to a question the Bay Area has been arguing about all fall. Oakland and San Joaquin County each voted for a 45-day pause on new data centers on October 6. The nearest homes to this building are about a mile away, and Houseberry's Sacramento ranking scores the neighborhoods closest to the base, including Foothill Farms at 2.2 out of 5 overall and Robla at 2.6.

What the permits say, and what they leave out

The main permit covers the data center and a generator building, with two follow-up cases filed July 31. The generator building was issued that day. The carports are still in review. Both carry $0 valuations because the cost sits in the main permit. The deferred drawings list the parts of the building still being checked: the precast concrete structure, the data hall elevators, the curtain wall, the exterior cladding and the steel stairs.

The county record names no owner, because the feed does not have that field. The trail to Prime is short. Prime announced on May 7, 2026 that it had broken ground on a second Sacramento building of about 150,000 square feet and 18 megawatts, powered by SMUD, with Clune as general contractor, as DatacenterDynamics reported. Industry directories list Prime's Sacramento campus at 2407 and 2408 AK St. The permit's own name, SMF01.02, follows Prime's naming. Prime's January 2025 pre-application described the same mix the permits now show: a two-story data center, a generator building and an administration building on 7.74 acres.

Here is a number that does not add up yet. The data center is valued at about $416 per square foot. The office next door works out to about $1,750 per square foot, more than four times as much, for a 5,700 square foot single-story building. The permit does not explain the gap, and the county has asked for a resubmittal.

How big is 18 megawatts here

Eighteen megawatts is a mid-size building by data center standards. In Sacramento it is close to the top of what the local utility already serves.

SMUD says its biggest existing customers draw about 20 megawatts, and it defines a "large load" as anything over 50, according to its large-load project page. It expects to bring a large-load policy to its board in early 2027, and it reported four data center inquiries in mid-July, one over 50 megawatts and three over 20. NTT's campus in Natomas is about 52.7 megawatts. Prime's first McClellan building is 8.

So this permit is not the stress test. A 50-plus megawatt request is. SMUD says it has no approved project that size in Sacramento yet.

The neighborhoods around McClellan

McClellan Park covers about 3,000 acres. The base closed in 2001, and the park is now owned by Industrial Realty Group. The homes closest to AK Street are in North Highlands to the northeast and the unincorporated streets south of the base near Edison Avenue, each about 1.1 miles away by our straight-line estimate from the county's map point.

Houseberry scores 185 Sacramento neighborhoods, and several sit just outside the base.

All three rank in the bottom half of the city, where overall scores run from 1.6 to 3.8. Prices around the base sit near the Sacramento typical of about $415,000 on Houseberry's Sacramento city page. Redfin put North Highlands' median sale at about $414,700 in July 2026 and Rio Linda's at about $467,300. You can see each neighborhood's full profile on Houseberry's pages for Robla, Raley Industrial Park and Foothill Farms.

Our earlier look at whether data centers hurt home values cited a Realtor.com study of 43 ZIP codes that found no meaningful effect on prices near new large data centers. The fights that do happen are about power bills, water, tax breaks and noise. At McClellan, the building sits inside an industrial park on a former air base, and the closest homes are a mile off.

Our view

We think McClellan is a sensible place for a building like this. It is old military land zoned for industry, it already hosts a data center, and the utility serving it is writing rules before the big requests arrive rather than after. The City of Sacramento's own position, as Councilmember Eric Guerra put it to Abridged in September, is that data centers are not allowed inside city limits. That leaves unincorporated land like McClellan.

The fair criticism is jobs and power. Prime has described about 250 construction jobs at peak and about 30 permanent ones for a $54.5 million building. The generator building means backup generators, and those need their own air district permits. Neighbors in North Highlands are right to ask what SMUD's 2027 rules will require of projects that come after this one.

To compare the neighborhoods around the base with the rest of the city, see Houseberry's Sacramento neighborhood ranking.

Sources

• Sacramento County permits feed, CBNC2025-00334 and related cases&outFields=*&returnGeometry=false&f=pjson)
• DatacenterDynamics: Prime breaks ground on its latest Sacramento data center (May 2026)
• SMUD: large electrical load project growth
• Abridged: large-load data center requests in Sacramento (September 2026)
• Stocktonia: San Joaquin County halts new data center approvals (October 2026)
• Redfin: North Highlands housing market