A Company Wants to Build a City for AI on Alameda Point. But the Land Is Already Spoken For

A company with ties to the tech industry is seeking to bypass regulatory and environmental red tape to build an independently governed, AI-focused city within Alameda.

In a thread posted on X Sunday from Frontier Valley, the company’s founder, James Ingallinera, called on President Donald Trump to declare a national security emergency and immediately approve development on a 512-acre parcel of federally owned land at Alameda Point, the former site of Naval Air Station Alameda. The goal, Ingallinera said, is to accelerate the development of AI and robotics and to foster technology supremacy for the United States.

“This is the Manhattan project of our time,” Ingallinera said in a promotional video filmed at Alameda Point. “If we fail to rise to the occasion right now, then China will crush us, and that will be the end of America as the world’s greatest superpower.”

Ingallinera is proposing to build a city full of AI-focused startups and robotics manufacturers, housing for 10,000 residents, a commercial district, statues of American pioneers and a waterside park. The company drafted an executive order for Trump to sign that the company claims would allow development to proceed on the parcel, which is currently designated as a nature reserve (PDF).

Alameda city officials, however, told KQED they were never contacted by the company and only learned of its plans through its weekend post on X. Mayor Marilyn Ezzy Ashcraft called the plans a “head scratcher.”

“They haven’t talked to the city at all,” she said, adding that a development of that size would be challenging to build on land that is subject to sea level rise.

The Department of Veterans Affairs currently owns about 624 acres of the former Naval Air Station and plans to build a medical clinic and a National Cemetery Columbarium, an above-ground burial site which could hold the remains of 300,000 veterans and spouses at Alameda Point. The project was authorized and funded by Congress and is planned to be constructed by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

“This is a big deal that we need a new veterans administration clinic and the burial spaces,” Ashcraft said. “They’re very much needed.”

The columbarium and medical clinic, however, will account for only a fifth of the federal agency’s land. The remaining 512 acres, which Frontier Valley wants to build on, are a former aircraft landing strip and the nesting grounds for several bird populations, including the endangered California Least Tern.

According to LinkedIn, Ingallinera has founded a series of startups and was most recently an advisor for the Carboncopies Foundation, a research organization studying whether the human brain can be scanned and simulated digitally.

Neither he nor other members of Frontier Valley responded to KQED’s requests for comment.

While his promotional video shares little detail about his background, it paints a picture of sluggish bureaucracy slowing down the country’s progress in developing competitive AI technology, including humanoid robots. In it, he claims that because this new city would be built on federal land, it would “have total independence from the surrounding Bay Area and the state of California, avoiding the failures of many previous governance structures.”

He urged the White House to transfer the 512-acre parcel from the Department of Veterans Affairs to the Department of Defense. Neither federal agency responded to KQED’s requests for comment.

Gary Marcus, an AI expert, disagreed with Ingallinera’s characterization that red tape is holding back the development of humanoid robots and said the real bottleneck is software.

“That’s mostly a (very hard) software problem, not a hardware problem,” he wrote in an email to KQED. “Companies can utterly work on that to a fair degree without a lot of red tape.”

The city of Alameda is moving forward with its own mixed-use development on Alameda Point, adjacent to where Frontier Valley is proposing to build its city. It had planned to develop a portion of the former airstrip into a 158-acre open-space park that would be operated by the East Bay Regional Park District.

In an emailed statement, Sarah Henry, a spokesperson for the city of Alameda, told KQED that “no reasonable fact” supports a proposed declaration of a national security emergency at the site.

“The city is in full support of the VA facility and regional parks project, which will serve Bay Area veterans, residents and visitors for many decades to come,” she said.