Oracle faces land dispute that threatens AI data center project

Oracle’s massive data center project in southern New Mexico, a linchpin of the Stargate AI infrastructure initiative, is hitting the kind of real-world obstacles that no amount of computing power can solve. Permitting delays, environmental opposition, and water concerns have piled up to the point where Oracle issued a force majeure notice in late September, essentially telling its partners that forces beyond its control may prevent it from hitting key deadlines. The project’s construction debt is already trading at 89 to 91 cents on the dollar. What Project Jupiter actually is Project Jupiter is a 1,400-acre hyperscale data center campus in Dona Ana County, New Mexico, designed to deliver up to 2.45 gigawatts of power capacity. The site is being developed by Stack Infrastructure, a portfolio company of Blue Owl Capital, with Oracle serving as the anchor tenant. The workloads running on those servers would primarily serve OpenAI, making this a critical piece of the broader Stargate initiative. Blue Owl has committed approximately $3 billion in equity, while a bank consortium that includes Goldman Sachs has arranged up to $20 billion in construction debt. Oracle’s force majeure notic...