Oracle Invokes Force Majeure on Stargate's Project Jupiter as New Mexico Pipeline Slips to 2027

On September 24, 2026, Oracle sent developer Stack Infrastructure — owned by Blue Owl Capital — a force majeure notice covering Project Jupiter, the 2.45-gigawatt data center campus it is building near Santa Teresa, New Mexico as one of the anchor sites of the Stargate program with OpenAI and SoftBank. Per Bloomberg’s reporting, confirmed by statements from both companies to other outlets, the notice preserves Oracle’s contractual right to defer rent payments for up to three years if the campus’s power infrastructure is not ready when the site is due to open in 2028.

What is known. The holdup is a natural gas pipeline, not a shortage of chips or capital. Project Jupiter’s on-site power is meant to come from Bloom Energy fuel cells fed by a roughly 17-mile “Green Chile” pipeline extension that Transwestern Pipeline, an Energy Transfer subsidiary, is building. New Mexico’s State Land Office has twice — in March and again in July 2026 — denied the pipeline a right-of-way across state trust land, and Energy Transfer’s own FERC filings now show the in-service date slipping from around September 2026 to February 1, 2027, according to El Paso Matters and corroborating trade coverage. A separate state air-quality permit for the fuel cells has also not been issued; a public hearing was delayed by litigation before a court cleared the process to resume. Financing details reported around the deal: a roughly $18 billion construction loan from a consortium of about 20 banks, against a total planned investment for the full multi-phase development that Bloomberg and other outlets put at up to $165 billion. Doña Ana County is set to receive $12 million a year for 30 years under the project’s tax agreement; a county commissioner told El Paso Matters that Oracle had not updated local officials on the delay. Both companies are playing down the significance: an Oracle spokesperson called force-majeure notices “commonplace in developments of this scale,” and Blue Owl said the notice “does not change the financial commitments to this multi-year project.” Oracle stock fell roughly 4% in premarket trading on the news, per Yahoo Finance.

What this means for capacity buyers. Project Jupiter is a hyperscaler-anchored build, not colocation capacity our catalog would carry — but the mechanism is directly relevant to anyone signing multi-year power or lease commitments in gas- and grid-constrained US markets right now. A force majeure clause tied specifically to “power commitments” is becoming a template response to permitting risk: landlords and lenders are being asked to absorb the schedule risk of state-level right-of-way and air-permit fights that neither party fully controls. That’s the same underwriting question we flagged in Texas’s permit-halt story — power and water access, not construction cost, is now the binding constraint on hyperscale timelines. For financing structures more broadly, see our AI data center financing guide; for how permitting delay compares across regions, our energy hub and colocation price index track where power is actually available versus merely announced.

What we don’t know. Whether Oracle will actually invoke the rent deferral or is simply preserving the option is unclear — neither company has said so. Reported figures on physical construction progress (some outlets cite roughly 26% campus-wide completion and around 10% for the fuel-cell microgrid) come from a single source we could not independently confirm, so we’re not treating them as established. It’s also unresolved whether the pending air-quality permit will clear before the pipeline’s new February 2027 target, and what happens to Doña Ana County’s tax revenue timeline if first-phase operations — originally targeted for late 2026 — slip further.