Donald Trump’s $500 billion AI infrastructure project is in major trouble in New Mexico, as a pivotal data center project appears to be shriveling on the vine.
Early on Thursday, the AI company Oracle sent out a notice of “force majeure” to the Blue Owl Capital, the lender backing a massive hyperscale data center critical to the president’s ambitious AI project, Bloomberg reported.
Typically reserved for unexpected catastrophes like the outbreak of war, natural disaster, or massive social upheaval, Oracle invoked force majeure in order to shield itself from financial liability over the project’s failure to secure certain development permits.
Zooming out, the notice is being viewed by financial commentators as an attempt by Oracle to wriggle out of responsibility for upcoming payments in the increasingly likely event that the data center isn’t finished by 2028.
When — or if — the New Mexico facility goes online, the plan was for Oracle to become the primary tenant, making use of the facility’s 2.45 gigawatts of compute power for AI. A part of the $165 billion AI campus called “Project Jupiter,” the data center has run into heaps of local opposition and delays.
Back in May, it was reported that Oracle had cancelled plans to erect a massive natural gas plant needed to power the facility, after developers failed to secure land use permits from both state and federal authorities. Instead, Oracle said it was pivoting to a solution using solid oxide fuel cells (SOFCs), an experimental stopgap that’s never been tried at this scale.
Indeed, the single largest deployment of SOFCs to-date appears to be an 80 megawatt project in South Korea — a drop in the bucket compared to the 2.45 gigawatts required if the data center is to reach its original planned potential.
Oracle is the main infrastructure company behind Trump’s Stargate project, a private build-out involving OpenAI on the software side and the Japanese investment giant SoftBank on the financial management side. Oracle has already struggled mightily this year, with lenders growing jittery about Jupiter’s financial prospects as early as January, forcing the cloud and infrastructure giant to lay off thousands of workers in an emergency cost cutting spree.
Clearly even those drastic maneuvers weren’t enough to right the ship, as Oracle now braces for a serious financial impact.
Keep in mind, the data center in question is just the first piece of the Project Jupiter campus, itself just one component of the $500 billion Stargate. If the ship piloted by these titans of industry is already on the rocks, it doesn’t exactly bode well for the rest of Trump’s megaproject — nevermind the AI buildout writ large.
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