Oracle's Force Majeure Notice on Project Jupiter Rattles AI Infrastructure Financing

What happened

On Thursday, September 24, 2026, Oracle sent a force majeure legal notice to Blue Owl Capital concerning Project Jupiter, its planned AI data center campus in New Mexico, according to Bloomberg News as aggregated by ground.news on September 25, 2026. The notice seeks to protect Oracle from potential cost increases and to suspend some contractual obligations during disruptions. It could allow Oracle to delay payments if the 2.45-gigawatt campus misses its 2028 completion target. Blue Owl says its commitments remain unchanged.

The trigger, per a person familiar with the matter cited by Reuters, was Oracle's difficulty securing power to the site. The program is being delayed by a year, the same person said. Blue Owl has about $3 billion of equity invested in the project and earns a lower return during construction, with returns increasing once the data center is completed. The delay pushes back the start of those higher returns.

Market reaction was swift. Oracle shares slid about 4% in premarket and Thursday afternoon trading as investors questioned the company's ability to deliver on its massive AI infrastructure expansion, per Reuters. Oracle stock closed down 3.5% on Thursday, and Blue Owl closed 3.6% lower. Bloom Energy shares also slumped, as the two companies are linked through a fuel-cell contract powering the New Mexico data center project.

The story was carried by 65 sources, rated 31 of them: 17 centre, 8 left and 6 right. German daily Welt reported on September 25, 2026, that Oracle wants to stop payments for the $18 billion data center due to construction problems in New Mexico, warning that the banks involved would be left holding unsellable loans (https://www.welt.de/wirtschaft/plus6ab5389fb2d23610d25cb0e0/oracle-das-aus-fuer-project-jupiter-nach-diesem-manoever-droht-das-ende-des-ki-booms.html).

Why it matters

Reuters reported on September 25, 2026, that the move "sent a chill through the trillion-dollar market for AI infrastructure financing" (https://www.thehindu.com/sci-tech/technology/oracles-project-jupiter-delay-sends-ripple-through-ai-financing/article71507113.ece). Project Jupiter is a data center campus being built by Blue Owl unit STACK Infrastructure to support OpenAI, and the force majeure notice is now reverberating through other proposed data center financings. SB Energy, which is developing a campus to serve OpenAI in Ohio, decided this week to delay its IPO.

The legal mechanics matter as much as the headline. Evercore called the notice "a pretty sensible move" to align revenue and expenses. RBC Capital Markets analyst Rishi Jaluria wrote that it signals Oracle's increased execution risk warranting legal protection. Sean McDevitt, partner at Arthur D. Little, framed the shift in the market's attention: "The financing side of the AI buildout is starting to ask much harder questions than the demand side... investors and lenders are increasingly focused on how risk is allocated." Rajat Rana, a New York-based partner at Quinn Emanuel, pointed to how quickly deal terms are changing: "These contracts are so rapidly evolving. If you look at a data center contract from January this year and a contract today, it's massively different."

The stakes are large. AI-related capital spending by the six biggest US tech companies is projected to reach around $1 trillion in 2027, per Moody's. A dispute over payment obligations at a single 2.45-gigawatt campus has therefore become a test case for how risk is distributed across the financing stack of the wider AI buildout.

Blue Owl pushed back on any suggestion of a rupture. In a statement, the firm said: "Blue Owl, STACK Infrastructure and Oracle remain fully aligned on Project Jupiter. This notice does not change the financial commitments to this multiyear project."

There is also a local dimension. Project Jupiter is the massive Santa Teresa, New Mexico development intended to host AI infrastructure for companies like Oracle and OpenAI, and it has spurred protests, lawsuits and fierce pushback over environmental impacts and transparency, according to a September 25, 2026 report by Julia Gentin in the Santa Fe New Mexican. On Thursday, the New Mexico Supreme Court denied petitions filed by environmental groups against the hyperscale data center, allowing permit proceedings to advance.

What to watch

• Whether Oracle and Blue Owl reach a revised payment schedule for Project Jupiter, or whether the force majeure notice hardens into a prolonged contractual dispute over the 2028 completion target.
• The one-year delay's effect on Blue Owl's return profile, given its roughly $3 billion of equity invested and the construction-period return discount.
• Power procurement at the Santa Teresa site, the stated cause of the force majeure invocation, and whether grid constraints force further schedule changes.
• Contagion in AI infrastructure financing, starting with SB Energy's delayed IPO for its Ohio campus serving OpenAI, and whether lenders demand new risk-allocation terms in data center contracts.
• Oracle and Blue Owl share prices following Thursday's closes of down 3.5% and 3.6% respectively, and any further moves in Bloom Energy tied to the fuel-cell contract.
• Permit proceedings in New Mexico after the state Supreme Court's Thursday denial of the environmental groups' petitions.

By the numbers

Source snapshot