Blackstart Is Buying IBM's Almaden Campus and Its 25-Megawatt Substation

Blackstart Digital has agreed to buy the former IBM Almaden Research Center in San Jose, California, and expects to close before the end of 2026. The property at 650 Harry Road holds seven buildings and more than 500,000 square feet, and it comes with a 25-megawatt on-site substation the buyer has said it intends to expand. Blackstart, a data center development and investment firm co-founded in 2025, has not announced a planned capacity or disclosed a price.

The site is large, and most of it will stay empty. San Jose's City Council rezoned the 600.16-gross-acre property on August 18, 2026, under files C26-008 and ER26-088, moving roughly 35 acres into the Industrial Park district and the remaining 565.06 acres into Open Space. The city filed its notice of determination on August 27, relying on the Envision San Jose 2040 general plan environmental impact report and finding no new significant impacts. Industrial Park zoning permits research and development, manufacturing, assembly, and testing. No development application has been filed yet, and the planning department is still waiting on documentation.

That makes this a retrofit, not a greenfield campus. IBM opened the research center in 1986, and the buyer says the site already houses multiple generations of data center space. Electrical work on a job like this starts inside existing shells: tracing and documenting distribution that has no reliable drawings, demolishing and salvaging gear, pulling new feeders through buildings wired for laboratories, and sequencing around a substation that is already energized. Greenfield crews build to a clean set of plans. Retrofit crews build to what they find.

The substation is where the money is. Twenty-five megawatts is modest next to the hyperscale campuses now being announced, so expanding it means a fresh round of medium-voltage work: transformers, switchgear, protective relaying, grounding, and an interconnection with the local utility. Equipment of that class carries the longest lead times in the industry, which means procurement and engineering run well ahead of field labor. The electrical headcount on a site like this builds slowly, then all at once.

The hiring pattern also differs from the projects that have dominated the past year. Most large data center announcements have landed in Texas, Arizona, Oklahoma, Alabama, and the Dakotas, on remote parcels that run on traveling crews and per diem. A 35-acre industrial site inside San Jose draws from a local market where contractors already compete for certified hands. Under California Labor Code section 108.2, anyone making connections above 100 volt-amperes for a C-10 electrical contractor must hold state certification, and General Electrician is the classification that covers this scope.

Nothing is energized yet, and the entitlement path sets the clock: an application, public review, and permits all come before anyone pulls wire. But a Silicon Valley campus with a substation already in the ground is a shorter route to load than a greenfield site waiting in an interconnection queue.