Oakland Data Center Moratorium: What It Would Pause

Councilmember Carroll Fife wants a temporary pause on data centers in Oakland. Here is the building at the center of it, what a moratorium can legally do, where the proposal actually stands, and how the four closest neighborhoods score today.

Elena MarshPublished Sep 12, 20268 min read

The four-story former Berkeley Lab building at 415 20th Street in Uptown Oakland proposed as a data center, with the 1900 Broadway tower behind it Photo: Houseberry

The short version

The site is 415 20th Street, the former Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory supercomputing building, one block from the 19th Street BART station. Behring Cos. bought it for $6.8 million in December 2025.
The plan would put about 20,000 square feet of data center inside an 83,000-square-foot building and raise its draw from 4.5 megawatts to 20 megawatts.
A California moratorium like this is an interim urgency ordinance. Four-fifths council vote, 45 days to start, about two years maximum.
As of September 11 it was on no published Oakland agenda. The Rules and Legislation Committee, which schedules legislation, meets September 17.
Oakland would not be the first Bay Area city to try this. Oakley has had a moratorium since spring, and San Francisco and Hayward both had data center measures up on September 15.

415 20th Street is a squat four-story concrete building in Uptown Oakland that has been mostly dark since about 2015. Councilmember Carroll Fife wants the city to stop the clock before it wakes up as a data center. The Oaklandside reported on September 11 that Fife is seeking a temporary Oakland data center moratorium, and the load-bearing word there is sought. No ordinance has been introduced, nothing has gone to committee, nothing has been adopted.

The building was a supercomputer, and that is the whole argument

Nothing is being built here, which is why the fight is about permits. 415 20th Street housed the Oakland Scientific Facility, Berkeley Lab’s supercomputing site, until the lab left about a decade ago. It still has raised floors and heavy power service. Behring is marketing roughly 20,000 square feet of it as AI inference space at up to 20 megawatts, per Data Center Dynamics.

Then look across the street. 1900 Broadway is Behring’s own 39-story tower directly above the 19th Street BART station, opened in 2024 with 452 apartments. The company that filled one downtown block with renters wants a 20-megawatt load on the parcel next door.

Oakland’s planning code has no use classification called “data center.” There is no box to check, so the argument is over which existing box applies, and the developer’s answer is that this restarts a use the building already had. Opponents organized as No Data Center Oakland say that reasoning skips public review. Fife told KQED in August: “We haven’t approved nothing. It just got in front of the planning department.”

What a moratorium would pause, and what it would not

A moratorium is a pause button on the permit counter, not an off switch on anything already running. California cities adopt these under Government Code 65858, and the mechanics are strict.

The question	The answer under state law
What it pauses	New data center applications citywide while staff writes permanent zoning standards
What it does not pause	Leases already signed, permits already issued, or a use the city has already found allowed
How long	45 days, extendable to 10 months and 15 days, then one more year. About two years total
What it takes to pass	Four-fifths of the council plus written findings of a current and immediate threat to health, safety or welfare
What happens next	Rules Committee scheduling, a noticed committee hearing, then a council vote. None of it done as of September 11

That second row is the one people miss. Two West Oakland leases at the American Steel buildings on Mandela Parkway were already signed. A moratorium adopted in October does not unsign them.

Introduced is not adopted, and the calendar says so

As of September 11 the proposal had no ordinance number and no agenda item. Oakland routes new legislation through Rules and Legislation, and the city’s Legistar calendar has Rules at 10:30 a.m. on September 17, then the next committee day on September 22 with Community and Economic Development at 1:30 p.m. Rules first, committee second, council third. Watch September 17.

One correction while the story is young: Oakland would not be breaking Bay Area ground. Oakley adopted a data center urgency ordinance in April and extended it 5-0 in May through April 2027. What makes Oakland different is density. These are not warehouse parcels at the edge of town. They are blocks with apartment towers on them.

The four neighborhoods closest to the site

Within about a half mile of 415 20th Street, Houseberry ranks four Oakland neighborhoods, and none of them looks like the citywide average. Civic Center, the government district around Frank Ogawa Plaza, scores 1.5 out of 5 on safety and 3.6 on amenities. Waverly, the strip between Broadway and Pill Hill, scores 1.9 and 3.6. Lakeside, on the southwest shore of Lake Merritt, scores 2.9 and 4.1. Adams Point, the walkable shelf on the lake’s north shore, scores 3.3 and 4.1. Oakland citywide sits at 3.0 and 3.2.

Bar chart of Houseberry safety and amenity scores for four downtown Oakland neighborhoods versus the citywide average — Civic Center scores 1.5 on safety against Oakland’s citywide 3.0, while all four nearby neighborhoods beat the city on amenities.

These are the most walkable blocks in the city and the ones already carrying the hardest street-level trade-off. One caveat on money: Oakland’s citywide median sale price was about $974,220 in August 2026 on our Oakland city page, and most condo-heavy downtown neighborhoods fall back to that same citywide figure instead of carrying their own price history. The scores are the real neighborhood signal here, not the medians.

Noise, power and water, ranked by how much evidence there is

The three concerns are not equally supported, and pretending otherwise does opponents no favors. Noise is the most measurable. Cooling equipment typically runs 60 to 80 dBA, and cities that regulate it set a property-line cap, which is why we wrote up San Jose’s 55-decibel rule and its 500-foot setback precedent. Oakland has a noise ordinance. It has no data center setback.

Power is the biggest number. San Jose’s economic development office says a 99-megawatt facility draws about as much electricity as 166,000 San Jose homes. Run 20 megawatts through the same conversion and you get roughly 33,500 homes’ worth of demand on one downtown block.

Bar chart comparing the 20-megawatt Oakland data center proposal to the 452-apartment tower across the street in household-equivalent power — At 20 megawatts the proposed facility would pull roughly 33,500 homes’ worth of electricity, next to a tower holding 452 actual homes.

Water is where the rhetoric has outrun the record. The 100,000-to-a-million gallons a day figure describes hyperscale campuses, not a 20,000-square-foot machine room, and an air-cooled build uses close to none of it. Behring has not published a cooling design, which is itself a decent argument for requiring that disclosure in writing. On home values, we went through the evidence when Prologis proposed 516,000 square feet near Silver Creek and will not rerun it.

Forty miles south, San Jose spent the same week selling the opposite

San Jose is not debating whether to allow data centers. It advertises for them: more than 9,000 acres of data-center-zoned land, 93 percent carbon-free power, over 100 miles of recycled water pipe. The Mercury News reported on September 11 that a downtown San Jose building is being pitched for restaurants, shops and a data center at once. But San Jose makes each one go through a public hearing on a use permit, and in June its council ordered staff to write uniform standards for energy, water and emissions. The gap is not appetite. San Jose has a rulebook and a hearing. Oakland has neither.

Write the rules before the equipment arrives

Here is where we would push back, gently. A data center is not housing, and a 20-megawatt load sitting on top of a BART station in a downtown the city spent years planning for homes deserves a hard look. But a citywide pause is blunt, and it would also freeze the reuse of a building empty for a decade in a downtown with a real vacancy problem. The sharper ordinance is a narrow one: define the use, set a property-line decibel cap, require the cooling and power numbers up front, and stay out of the way of anything residential.

If you live in Adams Point or Lakeside or Waverly, the move is not to panic about a lease. It is to read the September 17 Rules agenda, because that is where this either gets a number and a hearing date or quietly does not. The way we look at neighborhoods at Houseberry, the question is never whether one building is good or bad. It is whether the rules around it got written before the equipment showed up.

Sources

Elena Marsh

Longtime Bay Area resident and housing writer who reads the council agendas and planning staff reports most people skip, covering development, zoning, and transit-oriented housing across the region.

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