The software company has served the developer of Project Jupiter with a force majeure notice, even as both sides say nothing has changed. The campus's gas supply now arrives in February 2027, and its $18 billion construction loan trades under 90 cents.
The $18 billion loan that is paying to build Oracle's New Mexico data center campus was already trading below 90 cents on the dollar. On Thursday, it emerged that the campus's future tenant had filed paperwork to protect itself if the project slips.
Oracle has served a force majeure notice on the developer of Project Jupiter, a unit of Blue Owl Capital. A force majeure clause excuses or delays a party's obligations when events it cannot control get in the way. Oracle is not abandoning its lease. The notice gives it grounds to defer payments if the campus misses its planned 2028 start.
Both companies played the notice down. Oracle said Project Jupiter "remains on our planned schedule" and that it is "fully committed to New Mexico and confident in our path forward." Blue Owl said the notice "does not change the financial commitments to this multiyear project" and described the two sides as "fully aligned."
The past year has brought a string of setbacks. A gas pipeline built by Energy Transfer to supply the site was scheduled to start this month. After the New Mexico State Land Office rejected its proposed route several times, the start date moved to , a delay of close to six months. The campus depends on that gas, since it is designed to run on Bloom Energy fuel cells. A permit central to its energy plans has been denied. Environmental groups and local residents have organized against it, and data center construction has turned into a campaign issue ahead of the midterm elections.
Jupiter is designed for 2.45 gigawatts of capacity, roughly what 1.8 million homes draw at any moment. It was the flagship announcement of the Stargate program that President Trump unveiled with Oracle, OpenAI and SoftBank, and it is one of five U.S. sites covered by OpenAI's $400 billion agreement with Oracle and SoftBank. Blue Owl portfolio company Stack Infrastructure is the builder, with equity from Blue Owl funds and debt from a syndicate of about 20 banks.
Investors reacted quickly. Oracle's stock was off 6.4% by midmorning, the weakest showing among S&P 500 technology companies and enough to extend its loss for the year to 31%. Blue Owl dropped 3.6%. A measure of Oracle's credit risk reached a record.
Two weeks ago, on the earnings call, co-Chief Executive Clay Magouyrk said Jupiter would not affect Oracle's fiscal 2027 revenue or earnings guidance.
Delay clauses have been spreading through the AI build-out. When Google agreed this year to buy computing power from SpaceX through mid-2029, it kept the right to cancel if access did not start by a set date. Law firm Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan said in a June note to clients that such clauses are becoming more common in data center deals and warned that "in AI data center projects, force majeure is no longer a back-end boilerplate provision."
For the lenders, the notice changes the risk they are holding more than the cash they are owed today. Their loan depends on a building that produces revenue, and the tenant has now documented a path to pay later if the building is late. Progress on the rerouted pipeline, a fix for the denied energy permit and the price of the $18 billion loan in the weeks ahead will show whether the notice remains a precaution.