A developer asked City Hall what it would take to put an AI data center in the old Bloomingdale’s on Market Street. San Francisco still needs tens of thousands of homes.
San Francisco has 350,000 square feet sitting dark on Market Street. It has close to 8,000 people without a home. You’d think somebody would put those two numbers in the same sentence.
Somebody did. They just had a different idea.
A Maryland development firm, KG Growth Partners, asked the city in June what permits it would need to build an AI data center at 845 Market St., the old Bloomingdale’s section of the shuttered San Francisco Centre mall, the San Francisco Chronicle first reported Monday. The firm said it was working with an unnamed potential buyer. As of Friday, no application had been filed, according to the Chronicle.
“I just wanted to see what permits we would need for an AI Data Center,” KG’s construction consultant wrote to the Department of Building Inspection, according to records obtained by the Chronicle.
KG’s CEO, Jared Krieger, told the Chronicle the firm doesn’t comment on live deals, but said the plan would not be “a conventional suburban server farm.” He described keeping the ground floor open to the public, with the technical work on the upper floors, and later said the client wants to turn the property into an “AI-controlled living space” with a rooftop garden whose food would go to a nonprofit serving transient shelters.
Nobody has explained what an “AI-controlled living space” is, or who would live there.
The Math Nobody’s Doing
Under its state-certified housing plan, San Francisco has promised to make room for more than 82,000 new homes by 2031, with more than half meant for low- and moderate-income households. If the city falls short of the halfway mark, the state can force it to rezone more land.
Meanwhile, the city’s 2026 point-in-time count found 7,973 people experiencing homelessness, about 3,400 of them sleeping outside. Black San Franciscans are overrepresented in that count, according to the city’s own reports, in a city where the Black population has been shrinking for decades because people could no longer afford to stay.
And downtown is the place the city has been betting on for new housing. San Francisco has spent years rewriting its rules, cutting fees and voting in tax breaks to turn empty offices into apartments. One of the first proposed conversions, 901 Market St., sits on the same stretch of Market as the old Bloomingdale’s.
So a vacant building downtown, in a city begging for housing, is being looked at for a building that houses computers.
City Hall Just Hit Pause
The timing is not good for the server crowd. On Friday, Mayor Daniel Lurie signed a 45-day moratorium on new data centers citywide while the Planning Department studies their impacts and writes rules for them. The Board of Supervisors had passed it unanimously.
The author was District 10 Supervisor Shamann Walton, who represents Bayview-Hunters Point, where at least two of the city’s known data centers already sit. Walton has argued the city’s zoning code doesn’t even define what a data center is. “Transparency about water and energy demands enforceable community benefits,” he said, according to the San Francisco Standard.
Lurie has talked about a downtown where people can work, live, play and learn. A building full of servers doesn’t do much living.
A Dead Mall Looking for a Second Life
The mall has been an eyesore and a symbol of downtown’s long slide since the pandemic. A sale fell through earlier this year, and ideas from a soccer stadium to a basketball facility have been floated, according to the Chronicle.
Whether a data center can even get enough power to the site, and whether KG’s client can close a purchase, are open questions.
The bigger question is the one the city keeps walking past. San Francisco has plenty of empty buildings and plenty of people who need a place to live. It hasn’t put the two together yet.
This story draws on reporting first published by the San Francisco Chronicle and the San Francisco Standard, and on city homelessness and housing data.
Photo: Inside the San Francisco Centre under the restored Emporium dome, 2006. Photo by maveric2003 via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0.
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