Oracle is hedging its bets. The company sent developer Blue Owl Capital a formal force majeure notice covering Project Jupiter, one of the flagship campuses of the Stargate initiative in New Mexico, rated at 2.45 gigawatts. That doesn't mean Oracle is walking away — the notice simply protects the company from penalties if the site misses its original 2028 opening target.
The reason is refreshingly unglamorous: a pipeline. The Energy Transfer gas line meant to fuel the campus's power plant is running nearly six months behind schedule after regulators repeatedly rejected permits for its original route, forcing a reroute in August 2026. The new in-service date is now February 1, 2027. A second holdup involves an air-quality permit for the Bloom Energy fuel cells that are also meant to power the site — New Mexico's environment department has until November 23 to rule on it.
"Project Jupiter remains on our planned schedule. We are fully committed to New Mexico and confident in our path forward," Oracle said. Blue Owl, for its part, stressed that the notice "does not change the financial commitments to this multi-year project." Both statements are technically accurate — force majeure clauses are routine boilerplate in contracts this large, not a fire alarm. But the fact that Stargate's biggest build, the joint OpenAI-Oracle-SoftBank venture unveiled alongside Trump early in his second term, is being held up by a pipeline permit and a state agency's calendar says something about how fragile AI infrastructure logistics have become. The site has also turned into a local political flashpoint, with residents and environmental groups opposing it ahead of the midterms.
New Mexico isn't the only place where power, not silicon, is the bottleneck. A day later, on September 25, Crusoe Energy walked away from a $1.25 billion deal with turbine maker Boom Supersonic that was supposed to give its data centers a stopgap power source built around 29 gas turbines. One company after another is discovering that megawatts, not chips, now set the pace of the AI buildout.
