Oracle invokes force majeure on New Mexico Stargate campus as gas pipeline slips

Oracle has issued a force majeure notice to the developer of Project Jupiter, a Stargate data center campus in New Mexico, Bloomberg reported on Thursday, in an account also covered by TechCrunch.

Force majeure provisions, which are common in energy and commodities contracts, excuse a party from contractual obligations when events outside its control get in the way. According to Bloomberg's sources, Oracle is not trying to use the notice to exit its role as the campus's main tenant. Instead, the filing works more like insurance: if the facility misses its target of coming online in 2028, Oracle could postpone payments to the developer without being in breach.

Energy supply sits at the root of the problem

The campus is designed to handle 2.45 gigawatts and is meant to run on gas-powered fuel cells from Bloom Energy, which makes a reliable gas supply central to the construction timeline.

Per TechCrunch's reporting, the notice follows a string of setbacks at the site, most of them tied to power. An Energy Transfer pipeline intended to feed gas to the campus has slipped by nearly six months, to February 1, 2027, after regulators repeatedly denied permits for the line; Bloomberg reported in August that the route was redrawn following those rejections. A separate air-quality permit for the fuel cell system that would power the campus is still pending, and New Mexico's environment department faces a November 23 deadline to decide on it.

Both companies insist nothing has changed

Despite the filing, Oracle says it still expects the project to arrive on time. "Project Jupiter remains on our planned schedule," the company said in a statement to CNBC. "We are fully committed to New Mexico and confident in our path forward."

Blue Owl Capital, whose unit received the notice, told CNBC that "this notice does not change the financial commitments to this multi-year project." Neither Oracle nor Blue Owl responded to TechCrunch's requests for comment.

A flagship project under political strain

Project Jupiter is one of the flagship sites of Stargate, the AI infrastructure initiative announced by Oracle, OpenAI and SoftBank together with President Donald Trump early in his second term. The New Mexico campus has drawn opposition from residents and environmental groups and has become a political flashpoint ahead of the midterm elections. According to Bloomberg, Oracle has responded with a public outreach campaign in the state aimed at winning over the project's critics.

The notice also arrives amid a broader squeeze. As TechCrunch notes, AI data center construction is facing growing national scrutiny at the same time as developers absorb steep costs to build capacity for customers such as OpenAI.

Why it matters

Force majeure is the language of pipelines and commodity shipments, not hyperscale computing. Oracle reaching for it on a marquee Stargate site suggests that the binding constraint on AI infrastructure is increasingly physical — gas lines, permits and local politics — rather than chips or capital.

For OpenAI, which is counting on this capacity as part of the Stargate build-out, any slip past 2028 would tighten an already tight market for training compute. For financiers like Blue Owl, the notice illustrates how contractual risk is being redistributed as AI construction projects grow larger, more expensive and more politically exposed. And for the wider industry, New Mexico is shaping up as a test case for whether AI's enormous energy appetite can clear regulatory and community hurdles on the timelines that developers have promised.

The immediate signals point in opposite directions: Oracle and Blue Owl both publicly maintain the schedule and the money are intact, while the paperwork Oracle has just filed exists precisely to manage the possibility that they are not.