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.
Ninguna de las partes involucradas describe a Júpiter como cancelado. La declaración de Oracle enfatiza el cronograma y el compromiso, y la de Blue Owl enfatiza las obligaciones financieras sin cambios. Pero el hecho de que Oracle sintiera la necesidad de reservar formalmente su posición legal meses antes de la fecha prevista en línea del proyecto sugiere que la propia confianza de la compañía en ese cronograma tiene límites, y que la era del financiamiento sin fricciones de infraestructura de IA está dando paso a algo más complicado.
Para los que siguen el desarrollo de la IA, las cifras a tener en cuenta son las que no se han hecho públicas: los hitos de entrega en el acuerdo Blue Owl, la estructura de sanciones que Oracle busca escapar y si los retrasos en el oleoducto de Nuevo México tienen contrapartes en otros sitios de Stargate. Esos detalles determinarán si Júpiter es un caso atípico o una plantilla.
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