We study the n-dimensional problem of finding the smallest ball enclosing the intersection of p given balls, the so-called Chebyshev center problem (CC B ). It is a minimax optimization problem and the inner maximization is a uniform quadratic optimization problem (UQ). When p ≤ n, (UQ) is known to enjoy a strong duality and consequently (CC B ) is solved via a standard convex quadratic programming (SQP). In this paper, we first prove that (CC B ) is NP-hard and the special case when n = 2 is strongly polynomially solvable. With the help of a newly introduced linear programming relaxation (LP), the (SQP) relaxation is reobtained more directly and the first approximation bound for the solution obtained by (SQP) is established for the hard case p > n. Finally, also based on (LP), we show that (CC B ) is polynomially solvable when either n or p − n(> 0) is fixed.