Oracle’s stock fell about 5% on Thursday after Bloomberg reported that the company had sent a force majeure notice on Project Jupiter, its giant AI data center campus in New Mexico. Oracle is not trying to walk away as the site’s main tenant. It wants to put off payments if the data center fails to come online in 2028 as planned, according to people familiar with the matter. Oracle said Project Jupiter remains on schedule and that it is “fully committed to New Mexico.”
Force majeure clauses are normally used to get out of contractual obligations when events outside a company’s control intervene. Here, Oracle appears to be staking out its contractual position early. It’s not certain the maneuver would actually free Oracle from its financial obligations. The notice went to the developer, a unit of Blue Owl Capital. Blue Owl owns Stack Infrastructure and supplies the equity, while Oracle is the tenant and not the borrower. Its lease payments ultimately service the roughly $18 billion project loan, so a deferral would hit Blue Owl’s equity first and the ~20 banks behind the loan second. That loan has reportedly traded at 89 to 91 cents on the dollar since mid-September.
A delay that was already brewing
The pressure point is power. The campus is designed to run on up to 2.45 GW of fuel cells from Bloom Energy, which in turn depend on a 17-mile natural gas pipeline. That pipeline has slipped from an August 2026 target to February 2027, after the New Mexico State Land Office repeatedly refused right-of-way permits across state trust lands. Bloom shares fell around 6% on the news, and Blue Owl dropped about 4%.
Oracle’s own leadership has acknowledged the tight timeline. Analysts note that the notice is the first formal step toward shifting the cost of a delay, one that market watchers had been flagging for weeks.
Another wobble for Stargate
Project Jupiter is part of the Stargate push with OpenAI, which has hit turbulence before. Back in 2025, OpenAI scaled back its early Stargate plans to a much smaller initial data center by year-end. Oracle then went on to sign a roughly $300 billion compute deal with OpenAI, a deal that made Larry Ellison briefly the world’s richest person and sent Oracle’s stock soaring. It has since given back much of those gains. Oracle has been the one major player funding the AI build-out heavily with debt, carrying over $100 billion.
That’s why a contractual notice on a single site moves the stock. Investors are watching whether the physical side of the AI boom, meaning land, permits, gas pipelines and local opposition, can keep pace with the financial commitments. Project Jupiter is increasingly seen as a symbol of the political and environmental backlash against the data center boom.
The open question is how much of Jupiter’s capacity is genuinely tied to 2027 shipments. Only about 1.2 GW of Bloom’s 2.8 GW master agreement with Oracle is contracted so far, and Bloom has said it can redirect equipment to other sites. An air permit decision is due by November 23, and it will be the next test.