Oracle has sent a force majeure notice to the developer of Project Jupiter, the 2.45-gigawatt artificial-intelligence data center campus rising in southern New Mexico, in a move to postpone rent payments if the site misses its 2028 opening. Bloomberg reported the notice on Sept. 24, citing people familiar with the situation, and both Oracle and the developer’s parent confirmed on the record that a notice exists.
The recipient is a unit of Blue Owl Capital. Stack Infrastructure, a Blue Owl portfolio company, is building the campus, and funds managed by Blue Owl have committed equity to it. Oracle is the anchor tenant, and according to Bloomberg’s account it is not trying to leave that role — it is trying to fix its contractual position in case the buildout slips.
Force majeure clauses excuse a party from contract obligations when something outside its control gets in the way. In this case, one of the people told Bloomberg, if Oracle and the developer agree that a force majeure event tied to power commitments has occurred, Oracle could win a three-year delay on rent once those payments start. It would still owe other costs in the interim, and it would still owe the rent across the full lease term once payments begin.
Both sides played the notice down. “Force-majeure notices are commonplace in developments of this scale and are often used to preserve contractual rights,” an Oracle spokesperson said. “They do not, by themselves, establish a project delay or change delivery expectations.” A Blue Owl spokesman said, “This notice does not change the financial commitments to this multiyear project,” adding that the parties remain “fully aligned on Project Jupiter.”
What has gone wrong at Project Jupiter
The campus sits in Doña Ana County, near the U.S.-Mexico border, and is one of five U.S. sites tied to the $400 billion agreement OpenAI signed last year with Oracle and SoftBank. President Donald Trump unveiled the Stargate program alongside the three companies’ leaders, calling it a “tremendous investment” at a scale that “nobody’s really ever seen.”
Power is the problem. Project Jupiter is designed to run on gas-fired fuel cells from Bloom Energy, which need a gas supply that does not yet exist. Energy Transfer’s pipeline to the site was due to begin service this month; it has slipped by nearly six months, to Feb. 1, 2027.
The delay traces to New Mexico’s State Land Office, which twice refused to let the line cross state trust land. Commissioner Stephanie Garcia Richard denied the application in March and rejected a request to reconsider on July 14, in a decision her office announced the following day. Energy Transfer had sought two rights-of-way and a business lease for a 0.6-mile segment of a roughly 17-mile line connecting the campus to an existing El Paso Natural Gas pipeline. Garcia Richard cited greenhouse gas emissions and the strain on water and other resources, and said the pipeline “appears to offer very little benefit to the State Land Office’s beneficiary institutions, the local community, or New Mexico as a whole.” Energy Transfer has since rerouted the line onto federal land.
Lenders are watching
About 20 banks provided an $18 billion construction loan for the campus, one of the outsized debt packages underwriting the AI buildout. The notice does not constitute an event of default under that financing, one of the people told Bloomberg, but the debt was already trading below 90 cents on the dollar, a level that signals stress.
Markets treated the news as a negative. Oracle shares were down 4.4% at 12:38 p.m. in New York on Sept. 24, extending a year-to-date decline of 29%, and Blue Owl fell 3.7%. A gauge of Oracle’s credit risk hit a record high the same day, according to Bloomberg.
The episode lands on a question that has followed the AI buildout into commercial real estate: how durable are hyperscale data center leases when the power does not arrive on time? Those contracts routinely let the tenant walk if service does not start by a set date. RealtyWire reported earlier this year that Nvidia was in talks to backstop OpenAI’s lease obligations at a large Ohio campus, an arrangement that exists precisely because landlords and lenders want assurance the rent will be paid.
Law firm Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan told clients in a June alert that the clause has moved to the center of these deals. “In AI data center projects, force majeure is no longer a back-end boilerplate provision,” the alert said. “It is a core litigation and risk-allocation tool that can determine whether a delay remains isolated — or cascades through the project’s construction, customer, power, insurance, and financing documents.”
A project that became a political test
Project Jupiter has also become a marker for how hard these campuses are getting to site. Local opposition is running well ahead of what developers assumed a year ago: a national poll this year put opposition to nearby data centers at 69%, and tracking of blocked and delayed projects found that local resistance stalled roughly $68 billion of development in the second quarter alone.
Oracle has been working to change minds in New Mexico. Whether it succeeds is unsettled — Bloomberg has previously reported that residents learned the campus was tied to Oracle and OpenAI only after it was approved.
“We are fully committed to New Mexico and confident in our path forward,” the Oracle spokesperson said.
On our reading, the notice is best understood as a hedge rather than a retreat: a tenant with a 2028 delivery date and a pipeline that now arrives in February 2027 is buying itself room, and saying so in writing. What it also does is create a paper record that a delay is plausible — which is why a routine contractual step moved two stocks and a credit gauge on the day it surfaced.
