Oracle has sent a "force majeure" notice over Project Jupiter, its sprawling AI data center under construction in New Mexico, after gas-supply problems threatened to derail the site's planned 2028 opening, Bloomberg reported Thursday, sending shares tumbling nearly 5% in premarket trading.

The notice, sent to the project's developer — a unit of investment firm Blue Owl Capital — doesn't signal Oracle is trying to walk away from the deal. Instead, the company wants contractual room to delay payments if the campus, located in Doña Ana County near the U.S.-Mexico border, isn't ready on schedule.

A $165 billion bet tied up in gas lines

Project Jupiter is part of the Stargate initiative to build out computing capacity for OpenAI, and could ultimately cost up to $165 billion. The site is designed to run on as much as 2.45 gigawatts of Bloom Energy fuel cells powered by natural gas — and getting enough gas to the remote site has proven to be the project's central obstacle, according to 247 Wall St.

Stargate, announced in early 2025 as a joint venture involving OpenAI, Oracle, SoftBank and MGX, aims to funnel hundreds of billions of dollars into U.S. AI infrastructure over the next several years. Project Jupiter is among its largest individual sites, and any delay could ripple into OpenAI's own compute roadmap.

FULLY COMMITTED TO NEW MEXICO AND CONFIDENT IN OUR PATH FORWARD

Oracle pushed back on the idea that the project was in jeopardy. "Project Jupiter remains on our planned schedule," the company said in a statement. "We are fully committed to New Mexico and confident in our path forward." Companies typically invoke force majeure clauses to excuse contractual obligations when events outside their control — natural disasters, supply disruptions, regulatory hurdles — interfere with performance.

The notice lands as Oracle races alongside rivals to lock up power and chip capacity for the AI buildout, a spending war that has made energy access, not silicon, the binding constraint for several major data center projects nationwide. Blue Owl Capital has not publicly commented on the notice, and it remains unclear how long the gas-supply issues could delay construction.