Oracle has sent a force majeure notice to its financing partners on Project Jupiter, the 2.45-gigawatt New Mexico site that anchors the OpenAI-SoftBank Stargate AI data-center program, telling lenders that a delayed Energy Transfer natural-gas pipeline could push the campus past its 2028 online target.
Why Oracle Filed The Notice
The notice, first reported by Bloomberg on September 24, 2026, was routed to Blue Owl Capital, the alternative asset manager underwriting a portion of the site's roughly $18 billion first-phase financing. It cites the six-month slippage of an Energy Transfer pipeline that was expected to feed the on-site gas-fired power plants; commissioning has moved from summer 2026 to February 1, 2027, according to filings.
Force majeure clauses typically let a builder defer payments and delivery dates when an external event breaks a project schedule. Oracle said it remains fully committed to New Mexico, and Blue Owl said the notice "does not change the financial commitments to this multi-year project."
Anatomy Of Project Jupiter
Project Jupiter sprawls across 1,400 acres in Doña Ana County, near the Texas border, and is designed to house four Oracle-operated data-center buildings totaling 2.45 GW of IT load — enough electricity to power roughly 1.8 million homes. The site is the second Stargate anchor to be publicly named after the 1.2 GW Abilene, Texas campus, and Oracle has already signed a multi-year cloud contract with OpenAI worth an estimated $30 billion a year to fill it.
What Stargate Loses If The Notice Sticks
Stargate — jointly announced by Oracle, OpenAI and SoftBank at the White House in January 2025 — promises up to $500 billion of AI infrastructure over four years. Slippage at Project Jupiter would ripple across OpenAI's compute roadmap and follow other stress signals in the buildout, from Oracle's $638 billion RPO backlog to the UAE's 5 GW site redesign after regional attacks.
Investors reacted quickly: Oracle shares fell more than 3% in pre-market trading on September 24, wiping tens of billions of dollars from the company's market capitalization. Energy Transfer did not immediately publish a response.
Regulatory Overhang
Local opposition to Project Jupiter had already been growing. The Project Jupiter Together coalition and the New Mexico Environment Department have queued air-quality hearings on the on-site gas turbines, and Oracle recently switched part of the primary generation plan to Bloom Energy fuel cells. Any further permit friction, combined with the pipeline slip, could push commercial operations past the 2028 target Blue Owl and its co-lenders underwrote.
Reporting based on coverage from TechCrunch, Bloomberg, CNBC and Data Center Dynamics.