A contractual shield, not an exit
Oracle has sent a force majeure notice to the developer of Project Jupiter, its 2.45-gigawatt data centre campus in New Mexico, TechCrunch reported on Thursday after Bloomberg first broke the story. The notice would let Oracle delay payments if the site does not come online in 2028 as planned. CNBC confirmed the recipient is a unit of Blue Owl Capital.
Force majeure clauses excuse a party from its obligations when something outside its control gets in the way. Invoking one is not the same as walking away, and Oracle is not giving up its role as the campus’s anchor tenant. “Project Jupiter remains on our planned schedule,” the company said in a statement to CNBC. “We are fully committed to New Mexico and confident in our path forward.” Blue Owl said the notice “does not change the financial commitments to this multi-year project.”
What is outside Oracle’s control
Almost all of it is power. The campus is designed to run on fuel cells from Bloom Energy, and those fuel cells need gas. An Energy Transfer pipeline built to deliver it has slipped by close to six months, to 1 February 2027, after regulators repeatedly refused permits for the line.
A separate air-quality permit for the fuel cell installation is still pending, and New Mexico’s environment department faces a 23 November deadline to decide it. Neither of those is a construction problem Oracle can solve by hiring more crews, which is precisely the argument a force majeure notice makes.
Bloom Energy, whose shares fell about 3 per cent on the news, said on X that it remains committed to the contract and to the planned timeline.
Why the market cared
Oracle shares fell more than 3 per cent on Thursday, and Blue Owl’s fell too. The reaction is less about one campus than about how the Stargate build-out is financed. Roughly $18 billion of debt tied to the data centre is already trading at stressed levels, according to the Financial Times, and a force majeure notice is the kind of document that lenders read closely.
The project has also become political. It sits inside the Stargate programme Oracle announced alongside OpenAI and SoftBank at the White House, and it has drawn opposition from residents and environmental groups in a state heading into midterm elections.
What to watch
Oracle’s own guidance has not moved. Co-chief executive Clay Magouyrk told analysts on the company’s 10 September earnings call that Project Jupiter would not affect previously stated fiscal 2027 revenue or earnings guidance, and Thursday’s notice did not change that.
The next hard date is 23 November, when the state must rule on the air permit. After that, the pipeline’s 1 February 2027 target is the one that decides whether 2028 is still realistic. A second force majeure notice, or a revised in-service date, would say more than any statement about commitment.
