OpenAI's New Mexico data centre is waiting on one gas pipe and two permits

Project Jupiter is built to run on its own fuel-cell power plant. The plant needs gas from a single new pipeline, and two regulators have deadlines to decide on the plant's air permit and the pipe before Oracle's own December condition comes due.

On September 24, Bloomberg reported that Oracle had sent the developer of Project Jupiter, a unit of Blue Owl Capital, a notice citing force majeure, according to people familiar with the situation who asked not to be named. In Bloomberg's account, Oracle is not trying to walk away as the site's main tenant; it is seeking to put off payments should the data centre get derailed. Oracle has filed nothing on it. Oracle's stock closed down 3.47% that day, on a day when other news was also moving markets, so the report cannot be credited with the whole move.

Oracle's reply was direct. A spokesperson said such notices are commonplace and do not by themselves establish a delay, and the company told CNBC that Project Jupiter remains on our planned schedule. The reel you watched is about why the schedule is worth reading closely anyway: the campus depends on one pipe, and the pipe and the power plant each sit in front of a regulator with a deadline.

Project Jupiter is one of the Stargate sites announced by SoftBank, OpenAI and Oracle, in Doña Ana County, New Mexico. The county describes a potential investment of up to $165 billion over 30 years, with a minimum initial investment of $50 billion and a first phase anticipated in the third quarter of 2028. The campus is under construction. Oracle is the tenant, and the project is led by STACK Infrastructure in partnership with BorderPlex Digital Assets.

The campus is designed to run on up to 2.45 gigawatts of Bloom Energy fuel cells, which the state air permit rates at 2,462 megawatts, and Oracle will continue to bear all energy costs. Fuel cells make electricity from natural gas without burning it in a turbine, which is why the design stands or falls on gas supply. Oracle put the dependency in its own words in a May filing to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission: without a reliable source of natural gas, the power plant cannot function. The same filing names an Oracle subsidiary, Green Chile Ventures, as the pipeline's sole shipper.

The gas comes through a 17.77-mile line proposed by Transwestern Pipeline Company, an Energy Transfer unit. The first problem was land. New Mexico's State Land Office cancelled the applications to cross state trust land in March and denied reconsideration on July 14, over less than a mile of route. Transwestern redrew the line to avoid state trust land, and it now runs mostly across federal land. That problem is behind it.

The second is the one that changed the federal timeline. Transwestern first filed under a prior notice process, a faster route for projects under an existing blanket certificate. On April 13, FERC staff protested because the filing lacked a finding from the New Mexico State Historic Preservation Office that no historic properties would be affected. Transwestern did not file it by the deadline, so the request now proceeds as a case-specific application under section 7 of the Natural Gas Act, the slower path. The office asked on April 17 for further testing at one site, and an addendum survey report went to it on August 7.

The dates moved. Transwestern's original filing targeted service on August 15, 2026. Its August data response gave a revised estimate of February 1, 2027, without giving a reason. FERC has not tied that date to either problem, and neither do we.

The fuel cells need their own state air permit, and that has been a fight of its own. NMED, the New Mexico Environment Department, says it must approve or deny the permit by November 23 under state statute; the applicant says that date cannot slip, and opponents say it is not a hard stop. The hearing was set for September 14. The hearing officer recused himself on August 22, and on August 23 the New Mexico Supreme Court stayed the proceeding on a petition from New Energy Economy. KRWG reported on September 18 that the court had lifted the stay, and that NMED had yet to appoint a new hearing officer or set a new hearing date.

Oracle's remaining performance obligations and lease commitments are reported each quarter, next to its revenue. The chart above tracks Oracle and Bloom Energy's reported revenue by quarter on TradingView, and can be saved to an account ahead of the regulators' decisions in November and December. Readers who join through our link receive $15 off a TradingView subscription.

The four statements below are the parties describing their own position, which is why they carry more weight than any outside estimate. Read the second one twice. In July an Oracle vice president told the state regulator, under oath, that Oracle's gas, power and construction agreements are contingent on certain activities commencing by December 2026. The declaration does not say which activities, or what happens if they do not begin.

Three things. First, the risk in this story is sequencing, not demand. Nobody in the record doubts that Oracle wants the capacity: it reports $664 billion of remaining performance obligations and has signed a master services agreement with Bloom for up to 2.8 gigawatts of fuel cells. What the record shows is a chain in which each link has its own clock. The permit has to land before the plant can run, the pipe has to land before the plant has fuel, and the pipe has one more step after approval: FERC staff recommend that construction wait until the historic-sites consultation is complete. The two decisions due by November 23 and December 3 fall in or just before the month Oracle's own contracts name. That the dates collide is our reading, not anything a regulator or Oracle has said.

Second, the dockets will tell this story before the company does. Oracle will not report Jupiter as a line item; its $288 billion of lease commitments not yet begun are worldwide. The places a slip would show first are public and dated: FERC's order on Transwestern, NMED's ruling, a new hearing date, and the historic preservation office's reply on the August survey. A force majeure notice is a contractual step. A missed regulatory date is a fact anyone can check.

Third, time costs more than it used to. Oracle's free cash flow was negative $5 billion last quarter and it sold $20 billion of new stock, which makes it a company paying up front for capacity it will be paid for later. Our macro screen has the ten-year real Treasury yield near its highest level since the series began in 2003, so the months between building capacity and billing for it are expensive to carry. A delay of a few months at one campus does not change Oracle's picture. The same pattern repeated across a build of this size is what the lease and backlog numbers will eventually show.