Oracle Invokes Force Majeure on New Mexico AI Data Center as Shares Fall 3%

Oracle sent a force majeure notice on its 2.4-gigawatt Project Jupiter data center in New Mexico, seeking to delay payment if the 2028 deadline slips.

Oracle shares fell more than 3% on Thursday after the company confirmed it sent a "force majeure" notice tied to its New Mexico data center project — a legal maneuver designed to shield the company from higher expenses if the troubled AI campus fails to come online as expected in 2028.

The notice was sent to the project's developer, a unit of Blue Owl Capital, and was first reported by Bloomberg, citing sources familiar with the matter. CNBC confirmed the notice. According to Bloomberg's reporting, Oracle is looking to delay payment on the campus — dubbed Project Jupiter — if it does not come online on its expected 2028 timeline. Blue Owl's shares also fell on the news, as did those of Bloom Energy, which is slated to power the more-than-2.4-gigawatt facility with its fuel cells and dropped about 3%.

"Project Jupiter remains on our planned schedule," Oracle said in a statement to CNBC. "We are fully committed to New Mexico and confident in our path forward."

Blue Owl, for its part, sought to minimize the signal in the notice. "This notice does not change the financial commitments to this multi-year project," the firm said in a statement to CNBC.

What force majeure means here

Force majeure clauses excuse a party from contractual obligations when events beyond its control prevent performance. In the context of a hyperscale data center lease, invoking the clause is a way for Oracle to argue that regulatory delays and infrastructure setbacks — not its own execution — would be to blame if the project slips, and that it should not be locked into payments tied to a delivery date it can no longer control.

The legal move is unusual this early in a marquee project, and it lands at a delicate moment for the financing structure of the AI buildout more broadly. Reuters reported separately that the delay is sending ripples through AI financing, according to sources, a sign that investors are watching how risk is being reallocated among the unusual cast of characters — a chip-adjacent software giant, a private credit powerhouse, and a fuel-cell supplier — behind the industry's fastest-growing infrastructure bets.

A project riddled with setbacks

Project Jupiter is part of the broader Stargate artificial intelligence infrastructure build-out announced with President Donald Trump, and it has been riddled with setbacks and regulatory hurdles, according to CNBC. Those include local opposition to data centers ahead of the upcoming midterm elections and concerns from environmental groups about the facility's resource demands.

The site has also faced delays in the buildout of a natural gas pipeline intended to fuel the facility — a reminder that even as AI companies promise gigawatt-scale computing, the physical infrastructure to power it is constrained by permitting timelines, fuel supply, and local politics that move far more slowly than model release cycles.

Bloom Energy's fuel cells were slated to bridge part of that power gap, which is why the company's stock moved in sympathy with Oracle's. The more-than-2.4-gigawatt facility would rank among the larger AI campuses announced to date, and its power architecture — fuel cells now, gas later — reflects the improvised energy strategy that has become standard across the Stargate program.

Why it matters for AI financing

The Jupiter notice is the clearest signal yet that the financial engineering behind the AI data center boom is being stress-tested. Oracle has committed to enormous data center obligations to support its cloud and AI contracts, and projects like Jupiter depend on a chain of counterparties — developers, lenders, power suppliers, and utilities — each carrying a piece of the delivery risk.

A force majeure notice shifts some of that risk back toward the developer and its investors. If other projects follow suit, the cost of capital for AI infrastructure could rise, and the companies lining up gigawatt pipelines may find lenders demanding more protection before writing checks. That, in turn, could slow the physical expansion that underpins every frontier model roadmap for the next several years.

None of the parties involved is describing Jupiter as canceled. Oracle's statement emphasizes schedule and commitment, and Blue Owl's stresses unchanged financial obligations. But the fact that Oracle felt the need to formally reserve its legal position months before the project's expected online date suggests the company's own confidence in that timeline has limits — and that the era of frictionless AI infrastructure financing is giving way to something more complicated.

For trackers of the AI buildout, the numbers to watch are the ones that have not been made public: the delivery milestones in the Blue Owl agreement, the penalty structure Oracle is seeking to escape, and whether the New Mexico pipeline delays have counterparts at other Stargate sites. Those details will determine whether Jupiter is an outlier or a template.