Oracle Seeks Force Majeure Protection for $165B New Mexico Data Center
Sridhar Natarajan’s Bloomberg report on September 24, 2026 put the contractual move on the record the same day Michael Egbert was answering the Albuquerque Journal by email. The notice concerned Project Jupiter, the data-center campus Oracle still listed as expected online in 2028.
A force majeure clause is a contractual provision that can free a party from ordinary obligations when events beyond its control intervene. Egbert, an Oracle vice president, did not treat the filing as a timetable change. “Project Jupiter remains on our planned schedule,” he wrote. Force-majeure notices are commonplace in developments of this scale and are often used to preserve contractual rights among project partners, he said. They do not, by themselves, establish a project delay or change delivery expectations. He added that the company remained fully committed to New Mexico and confident in its path forward. The 2028 date stood as the mark the notice had been written against, even as the paper between the partners shifted.
Project Jupiter was a 2.45-gigawatt data-center campus planned for Doña Ana County, New Mexico. A data center is a physical facility that houses the computer systems, storage arrays, cooling systems, and high-speed networking equipment used to process, store, and transmit digital information. Hyperscale data centers support the continuous workloads of cloud computing and artificial-intelligence training; the largest consume more than 3,000 megawatts of power. The International Energy Agency estimated data-center electricity use at about 1.5 percent of global consumption in 2024 and projected that figure could roughly double by 2030. Project Jupiter’s design called for 2.45 gigawatts of capacity across four data-center buildings on a 1,400-acre campus.
Stack Infrastructure and BorderPlex Digital Assets were the builders. Blue Owl Capital had acquired Stack Infrastructure in 2024. Oracle, the multinational technology company headquartered in Austin, Texas, was announced as the tenant in January 2026. The builders had announced plans to invest up to $165 billion.
“We are excited about the more than $4.7 billion in economic benefit Project Jupiter is expected to bring to New Mexico,” Oracle said.
The campus had been designed to use gas-powered fuel cells from Bloom Energy. A fuel cell converts the chemical energy in natural gas into electricity through an electrochemical reaction rather than by burning the gas. The process yields a steady electrical output. Under that plan the fuel cells would supply the site’s power, which made a working gas connection essential rather than optional.
New Mexico state officials denied the natural-gas pipeline extension request in July 2026. An initial denial had come in March. The pipeline meant to supply the campus was an Energy Transfer project. After repeated permit denials from the New Mexico State Land Office, it was delayed nearly six months. The new service date was February 1, 2027. The gas would not come on the first timetable. The power scheme built into the project was stalled while the campus waited on fuel.
On the September 10 earnings call, Oracle co-CEO Clay Magouyrk faced questions about construction risk at large sites. “Anyone that’s been in the business of doing construction or large-scale infrastructure development, if their plan relies on 100% achievement of every one of their deliverables, we have a term for that: It’s called a bad plan,” he said. “New Mexico is an interesting location.”
The company had already begun building alternatives into the schedule. Earlier that month Oracle issued a request for proposals for 2 gigawatts of new renewable energy capacity in New Mexico. A request for proposals is a formal call that asks suppliers to bid on delivering a defined block of power under set terms. The same window brought an up-to-$1-million funding package for research into carbon capture and sequestration, technologies that pull carbon dioxide from industrial streams or the air and lock it underground so it cannot re-enter the atmosphere. Those steps treated missed deliveries as expected rather than exceptional. The renewable solicitation and the research money sat alongside the original design, ready if one path stayed closed.
Oracle posted a statement on X without directly acknowledging the Bloomberg report. “We are fully committed to New Mexico and confident in our path forward,” the company wrote. The post went out under the official account the same day the notice reached the public record and offered no separate account of the contractual filing.
Blue Owl issued its own statement in response. “This notice does not change the financial commitments to this multiyear project,” a Blue Owl spokesperson said. Construction rested on about $18 billion in loans from roughly 20 banks. Those loans had been arranged.
Last week the New Mexico Supreme Court lifted stays that had paused an air-quality permit application and blocked water pumping for the construction site in Doña Ana County. An air-quality permit is the state authorization required before industrial equipment that can release emissions is built or operated. Project Jupiter relied on that permit for a 2.45-gigawatt power plant to provide electricity to the data center. The stays had frozen the permit process and had kept the project from drawing on a well at the site. The court lifted both. The air-quality application could advance again. The separate stay that had prevented use of the well for construction water was gone as well. Work on the buildings had been continuing under county permits even while the stays remained in force. Construction itself stayed ongoing once the barriers came off.