Chase Center

The Chase Center is a large arena in San Francisco that hosts sports games and concerts. It opened in 2019 and has around 18,000 seats, depending on the seating configuration. Its home team is the Golden State Warriors basketball team, which plays its home games there. The arena gets its name from the US bank Chase, which paid for the naming rights. Such naming deals are common for American arenas and often run for twenty years or more. For readers of a business page, the venue is interesting for another reason as well: it sits right in the middle of the city’s technology district and is regularly rented out for corporate events.

An arena as a showcase for the tech industry

San Francisco is home to many well-known technology companies. When such a company wants to show off something new, it needs a stage for thousands of guests. Classic convention centers are often too small or too unspectacular for that. Large sports arenas, on the other hand, offer space, video walls, and ready-made sound systems.

That’s why the Chase Center is one of the venues for the Dreamforce conference. This is the annual flagship event of the software company Salesforce, which sells customer management programs. Tens of thousands of visitors come to the city each year for this week. Hotels, restaurants, and taxi companies generate a significant share of their annual revenue during this period.

The venue also matters for how an industry is perceived. When a company makes its announcement in a basketball arena, it sends a signal: we are big, we have an audience, we belong here. This is precisely why arena names like the Chase Center show up in business news at all.

How the building was financed

Many US arenas are built, at least partly, with taxpayer money. With the Chase Center, it was different. The Warriors and their owners financed the construction privately, at a cost of about $1.4 billion. The site is located in the Mission Bay neighborhood, right next to research buildings and office towers.

This money is not earned back through ticket sales alone. A modern arena has several revenue streams: suites for corporate clients, food and beverage services, rentals to concert promoters, and, of course, the naming rights deal with a sponsor. Additional office space and shops were built around the arena as well, generating rental income on an ongoing basis.

A common misconception is that an arena only works on game days. In fact, high utilization is the whole business model. Around 200 events per year is a realistic target, with basketball accounting for only about a fifth of that. Between an evening game and a concert the next day, the floor is completely converted.

When the name shows up in the news

In the sports section, you read about the Chase Center in connection with NBA results, the North American basketball league. In the business and tech section, on the other hand, it usually appears as a location reference following an announcement. A typical sentence reads: The company unveiled its new AI software in front of tens of thousands of guests at the Chase Center.

For audiences around the world, the arena is mostly present via livestreams. Such keynotes—that is, the opening presentations of major conferences—are broadcast online. Anyone watching such a broadcast can recognize the arena by the steeply raked seating rows behind the stage.

The venue should not be confused with the Moscone Center, San Francisco’s classic convention center. That’s where the technical talks and exhibition booths take place, while the arena hosts the big performances. Many conferences use both buildings in parallel, since they are only a few minutes apart.