OpenAI isn’t content with just dominating San Francisco anymore. The AI giant has signed a lease on a 202,000-square-foot waterfront site near the Richmond ferry terminal, marking its first major expansion into the East Bay. And yeah, it’s basically confirmed that this is going to be a robotics manufacturing hub.

The facility sits on 15.75 acres of Richmond’s waterfront and is located at the Portside Commerce Center. While OpenAI hasn’t officially announced what they’re doing there yet, sources and county records suggest the company plans to use it for robotics manufacturing. The space itself is basically perfect for what they want to do, it has over 14,000 amps of power capacity, which is absolutely bonkers compared to the typical 200 to 4,000 amps you’d find in regular industrial buildings. That kind of power is crucial for advanced manufacturing and robotics operations.

The building was originally developed for Moxion Power, a battery startup that went under in 2024 before they could even move in. So OpenAI is essentially swooping in on a space that was already built out for high-power industrial work. Talk about perfect timing.

This Richmond move isn’t happening in a vacuum either. OpenAI has been on an absolute real estate spree across the Bay Area. The company is already building a humanoid robotics lab in San Francisco, and employees got the heads up about the Richmond facility back in December. Meanwhile, OpenAI is occupying one million square feet in San Francisco’s Mission Bay neighborhood and just finalized a lease for 450,000 square feet in Mountain View down in Silicon Valley.

So what does all this expansion mean? Honestly, it signals that OpenAI is getting serious about robotics development and manufacturing, not just AI software. The company is posting job listings connected to the Richmond building, which suggests they’re actively staffing up for this operation. With the humanoid robotics lab in SF and now this manufacturing facility in Richmond, OpenAI is setting up an actual production pipeline for physical robots.

The East Bay location makes sense too. Richmond has cheaper real estate than San Francisco, access to the waterfront, and it’s still within the greater Bay Area ecosystem. Plus, that power capacity means they can run heavy-duty manufacturing equipment without worrying about electrical constraints. For a company trying to scale up robotics production, it’s basically ideal.

It remains to be seen exactly what kind of robots OpenAI will be building here, but given the scale of their expansion and the resources they’re throwing at it, you can bet it’s going to be significant. The company is essentially betting big on robotics being the next frontier of AI, and they’re building the infrastructure to back that up.