Oracle is building a $165 billion AI data center in the New Mexico desert. This week it sent out a legal notice covering itself in case that never actually happens.
The project is called Project Jupiter, Oracle’s piece of the Stargate buildout with OpenAI and SoftBank. The plan is 2.45 gigawatts of power coming online by 2028 to keep AI workloads running. That’s a serious amount of electricity. It also needs a serious amount of water. In the New Mexico desert, that’s not a small ask.
On Tuesday, Oracle sent a “force majeure” notice to Blue Owl Capital, the firm financing the project through developer STACK Infrastructure. Translated out of lawyer: if this thing doesn’t hit its 2028 deadline, don’t come looking at us. An Oracle spokesman called the move “commonplace” and said it doesn’t “by itself” establish a delay, which is the kind of sentence written specifically so you hear “nothing to worry about” while the company keeps every legal option open in case there’s plenty to worry about.
And there’s reason to worry. New Mexico’s Supreme Court has hit pause on this project twice this year. Once over a new well the state approved on an emergency basis, skipping the public hearing normally required before anyone gets to pump water like that. Once over an air quality permit that depends on knowing how the plant will actually be powered, which got complicated after the state’s Land Commissioner denied Oracle’s gas pipeline route across state land. Twice, in one year. Throw in loans backing the project trading around 89 cents on the dollar, and “force majeure” starts looking less like paperwork and more like a company hedging a bet it isn’t sure it’s going to win.
Here’s the part that should bother you no matter how you feel about AI or data centers in general. The Center for Biological Diversity, one of the groups suing over the water permit, made a simple point: the state fast-tracked approval to let Oracle start pumping before the normal process ran its course. Their attorney’s response was blunt — turn off the pump, there’s no emergency to build something that might never get finished. That’s not an anti-growth talking point. That’s someone asking the state to follow its own rules about who gets to use water in a desert. Which is about as legitimate as regulation gets.
That’s the real split here. I don’t have a problem with a company betting $165 billion on AI infrastructure. That’s what companies with money do. I don’t even have a problem with force majeure clauses — that’s what contracts are for. What gets me is doing both things at once. Oracle told investors it had just booked more than $30 billion in new AI contracts last quarter and that none of this touches its revenue guidance. Same week. It quietly sent its own financing partner a letter that exists specifically so nobody can hold it to the timeline if the wheels come off. Pick a story. Either the project’s fine, or you need legal cover in case it isn’t. You don’t get to be confident in the earnings call and hedged in the fine print on the same news cycle.
Meanwhile, a small New Mexico community is the one actually waiting to find out whether its water table survives a bet a trillion-dollar company hasn’t fully committed to winning.
Two cents: if you need a legal notice to protect yourself from your own project, maybe don’t tell everyone else it’s business as usual.