Oracle’s $165 Billion New Mexico AI Campus Faces Fresh Power Permit Delay
Oracle’s planned New Mexico data center campus reportedly faces renewed uncertainty over its power supply after the infrastructure developer waived a deadline for a key air permit decision.
Yucca Growth Infrastructure LLC relinquished its right to a ruling by Nov. 23, giving state environmental regulators more time to assess revisions to its proposed power facility, according to Bloomberg's report on Thursday. The move adds another hurdle for Project Jupiter, a campus Oracle is developing for OpenAI that the company has said could attract as much as $165 billion in investment over its lifetime.
The developer and the New Mexico Environment Department’s Air Quality Bureau also jointly requested that a Dec. 7 public hearing be postponed until the agency completes its technical review and submits a revised permit recommendation. Their Nov. 3 motion did not establish a replacement hearing date or a deadline for completing the review. The request itself does not constitute a decision on the permit.
The uncertainty highlights the difficulty of securing dedicated electricity supplies for large artificial intelligence facilities. Building power generation alongside a data center can reduce reliance on utility networks, but leaves developers dependent on approvals for both the computing campus and its energy infrastructure.
Oracle and BorderPlex Digital Assets announced in April that Project Jupiter, in Doña Ana County, would use up to 2.45 gigawatts of Bloom Energy Corp. fuel cells. That design replaced previously planned gas turbines and diesel generators with a single microgrid. Oracle said the change would reduce nitrogen oxide emissions by about 92% compared with the turbine design.
The fuel cells would generate electricity from natural gas, making fuel delivery another critical dependency. An Energy Transfer LP pipeline intended to supply the facility has also faced regulatory obstacles, Bloomberg reported.
Yucca’s waiver reverses its position less than two weeks earlier, when it insisted that it had not surrendered the Nov. 23 deadline and should not be required to do so, according to Bloomberg. Revisions to the application required further technical analysis, leaving regulators under pressure to reach a decision before that work was complete.
Jefferies analysts led by Julien Dumoulin-Smith said the developments pushed Bloom’s largest disclosed project into 2027, Bloomberg reported. That represents the analysts’ assessment of the timing, rather than a newly announced completion schedule from Oracle.
Oracle told Bloomberg it wanted to proceed efficiently toward a hearing and expected its application to receive treatment consistent with other projects involving comparable or higher emissions.
The companies’ shares fell sharply on Nov. 5 amid a broader retreat in AI infrastructure stocks. Oracle closed down 6.9% at $115.16, while Bloom lost 16.4% to $167.52. The Nasdaq Composite fell 5.5%, underscoring that the declines extended beyond the New Mexico project.
