Oracle's 2.45 GW Data Center Is Waiting on a 17-Mile Pipeline

Four times the price of pipeline gas. That is the premium Oracle pays to run a data center outside Salt Lake City, on compressed natural gas delivered by truck instead of by pipeline line.

For more than a year. On October 8, Bloomberg reported Oracle may repeat the arrangement in New Mexico.

The campus is called Project Jupiter. It is designed to draw 2.45 GW. The gas pipeline meant to feed it slipped six months, from August 15, 2026 to February 1, 2027.

That delay is not a scheduling nuisance. It is a specific failure mode of a buildout whose scarce input is no longer chips.

What has to arrive for 2.45 GW to switch on

Project Jupiter covers roughly 1,400 acres near Santa Teresa in Doña Ana County, New Mexico, on the border with Texas and Mexico. Four hyperscale buildings. A stated development value of up to $165 billion. Oracle is the tenant, and the campus is part of the capacity it is building for OpenAI.

Its power comes from behind the meter. Yucca Growth Infrastructure applied in April 2026 for a state permit to run up to 2,275 Bloom Energy solid-oxide fuel-cell clusters supplying 2,462 MW. No combustion, so no turbines and no diesel backup. Oracle says the switch cuts nitrogen oxide emissions by roughly 92% against the gas-turbine design it abandoned, and that the site uses a negligible amount of water.

PROJECT JUPITER — POWER PERMIT CHRONOLOGY
──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
  JAN 2026      MAR 2026      APR 2026      JUL 2026
  📄 FERC        ⛔ Rejected    ⚡ Fuel-cell  ⛔ Rejected
     filing        on state       pivot to     again on
     filed         trust land     2.45 GW      state land

  AUG 2026      SEP 2026      SEP 2026      NOV 2026
  📉 In-service  ⚖️ Supreme    📄 Force      ⏳ Air-permit
     slipped      Court lifts   majeure      decision
     to Feb 2027  the stays     sent          deadline

The line that was refused twice

The Green Chile Project is a 17.77-mile Transwestern Pipeline Company lateral across Doña Ana County. Energy Transfer filed it with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission in January 2026 as a roughly $60 million line moving gas from El Paso to the campus, up to 400 million cubic feet a day.

Twice since, the New Mexico Commissioner of Public Lands has refused it access to state trust land. Stephanie Garcia Richard's reasoning was that the line would enrich the developer and Energy Transfer while producing little revenue for the state, in an arid county, over a resource she called finite. Energy Transfer requested reconsideration in April. The answer did not change.

In May, Oracle asked FERC to expedite the review so the line could enter service by August 15, warning in the filing that missing the window would raise costs substantially.

If the pipeline is not able to enter service by this time, costs would increase substantially.— Oracle, in its May 2026 request that FERC expedite the Green Chile review, as reported by Bloomberg

It missed it. An August filing moved the in-service date to February 2027.

Transwestern has been pushing something larger alongside it: a 500-plus mile line from Waha, Texas to Phoenix, crossing southern New Mexico, pitched largely on data center demand. A second lateral, the Red Chile, would run 50 feet from the Green Chile line. Sierra Club members sent thousands of comments opposing that expansion to Arizona Governor Katie Hobbs, who has publicly supported it. On October 6, New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez called FERC's environmental assessment of the pipeline inadequate.

A permit with nobody presiding over it

The air permit is the other dependency, and its procedural position is worse than the pipeline's. On September 17 the New Mexico Supreme Court denied petitions from New Energy Economy and the Center for Biological Diversity, then lifted the stays it had entered on August 23. No reasoning was given.

The consequence is easy to miss. The Environment Department's hearing officer recused, and no replacement has been appointed, with no hearing date set. The November 23 decision deadline has not moved. Sixty-seven days after the court's ruling, the proceeding that decides whether 2,275 fuel cells can be built has nobody presiding over it.

Oracle has told commissioners that if the air permit fails, the campus would have to contract with a grid provider instead. The chair's response was pointed: the bond agreements were written around on-site generation, so that would come back to the commission. New Mexico lawmakers were separately weighing a statewide moratorium on large data centers, after New York adopted a one-year ban.

The State Ethics Commission disclosed on September 16 that Oracle had reported a $3,444,500 advertising campaign on the air permit, with $3,667,000 routed through a firm called Elevate — what the commission described as likely the largest lobbying advertising campaign ever disclosed in the state. More than seven million dollars aimed at one permit decision.

What the force majeure notice buys

On September 24, Oracle sent a force majeure notice to Blue Owl Capital, which owns STACK Infrastructure, the developer of record. Force majeure is the contractual clause that relieves a party of obligation when events beyond its control make performance impossible.

Here it is aimed at money, not blame. If the campus misses its 2028 target, Oracle is seeking to delay the payments it owes rather than forfeit the lease. STACK says the three parties remain aligned and that the notice changes no financial commitments. Oracle says the campus remains on schedule.

Both statements can be true, and they describe different exposures. Oracle is not claiming the building will be late. It is preserving the option to slow the cash if the permits slip. The first is a schedule question. The second is what a lender underwrites.

For the fuel-cell microgrid, the filing itself is internally tense. The same document expects construction to begin upon permit issuance with completion in November 2029, while separately listing anticipated startup at approximately October 2026. Two dates, one of which has already passed, in a document that also underwrites a 2028 go-live.

The arithmetic of dozens of trucks a day

Bloomberg's October 8 reporting puts a number on the workaround. Trucked gas costs roughly four times what pipeline gas costs. Oracle has kept a Salt Lake City site running this way for over a year, and uses trucked deliveries at a campus under construction for OpenAI in Shackelford County, Texas.

As we wrote in September, the pitch behind the whole behind-the-meter turn was simple — let a data center stop waiting on a utility and own its power supply. TAR raised $120M at a $1B valuation on that argument. Project Jupiter took it further, to 2.45 GW, and then discovered that owning the generation does not mean owning the fuel line.

Applying that to Jupiter is harder. Analysts cited by Bloomberg said even partial power for the New Mexico campus would require dozens of deliveries a day. Keeping one site alive while a line is under construction is a different proposition from running 2,462 MW on delivered gas.

What Oracle would be buying is time: first clusters online before the line starts service in February 2027, rather than waiting for it. Whether the arithmetic holds depends on gas prices, on how much power the first phase actually needs, and on how far the permit queue runs past November 23.

Oracle said in May it expected to spend about $50 billion on AI infrastructure this fiscal year. Its free cash flow is currently negative and is expected to stay negative until more AI data centers are completed. The company has separately issued a request for proposals for 2 GW of new renewable capacity in New Mexico, and committed up to $1 million to carbon capture research in the state.

The constraint moved

For three years the binding limit on AI capacity was fabrication. Then it became GPU supply. The New Mexico file suggests the next one is a permit queue and a pipeline schedule, and no amount of hardware ordering accelerates either.

Oracle's answer — a force majeure notice, a lobbying budget and tankers of gas — is what a hyperscaler does when someone else's calendar sets the pace.