While the world debates chatbots, OpenAI is buying warehouses.
In late March, the company leased an industrial building on the Richmond waterfront — 202,000 square feet on nearly 16 acres near the ferry terminal. That’s two football fields under one roof. For comparison, Anthropic’s entire San Francisco headquarters is smaller. The San Francisco Chronicle discovered the deal documents in Contra Costa County records.
OpenAI has said nothing about what will go inside. But everything points to robotics.
Business Insider reported in January, citing insiders, that the company was quietly building a robotics lab and preparing a second site — specifically in Richmond. Employees were notified in December. A «robotics operator» job posting appeared on the company’s website tied to the city. Most tellingly, the building on Harbour Way South can deliver more than 14,000 amps. That’s three and a half times more than a typical factory. Such power isn’t needed for an office or warehouse. It’s needed for machines.
OpenAI already operates a robotics lab in San Francisco. Business Insider described it in detail: about 100 operators working three shifts around the clock. People in telepresence headsets teach robotic arms to fold laundry and move objects. The lab has grown fourfold in a year. Now it needs more space.
The Richmond building previously sat empty. It was built for battery startup Moxion Power, which went bankrupt in 2024 before moving in.
For Richmond, the OpenAI deal is significant. The city’s industrial waterfront has seen better days. Developer Brookfield Properties couldn’t lease the Portside Commerce Center building for more than a year. Now a $300 billion company is moving in, bringing jobs this side of the bay hasn’t seen in years. Neither the city nor Brookfield has commented on the deal.
Richmond isn’t the only location. Over the same few weeks, OpenAI leased five buildings in Mountain View and Dropbox’s former headquarters in Mission Bay. The company’s total Bay Area footprint now exceeds 1.5 million square feet. Staff plans call for doubling headcount by year-end. OpenAI is expanding at a scale not seen in the Bay Area since Google’s first boom.
In 2020, the company shut down its robotics division, citing insufficient data. Six years, a $300 billion valuation and ChatGPT later, OpenAI is returning to hardware. Only now it has what it lacked then: a brain to put in the body.
The waterfront building in Richmond waits.
