AI financing has a new test case, and it starts with a gas pipeline in the New Mexico desert. On Thursday 24 September 2026, Bloomberg News reported that Oracle had sent a “force majeure” notice to Stack Infrastructure, the Blue Owl Capital unit developing Project Jupiter, a 1,400-acre data center campus in Doña Ana County that Oracle will lease to host computing capacity for OpenAI. By that evening, a Reuters analysis built on interviews with bankers and investors said the move had “sent a chill through the trillion-dollar market for AI infrastructure financing”.
The notice is not a cancellation. Oracle stays on as the tenant, and it says the campus “remains on our planned schedule”. A person familiar with the deal told Reuters the programme is being delayed by a year because power to the site is running late. The notice lets Oracle keep paying the lower, construction-phase rent for longer. That moves money down the calendar for Blue Owl, for the banks behind $18 billion of construction loans, and for everyone now pricing the next AI financing deal.
This article sets out what the notice does, why the power problem sits where it does and what it means for AI financing. It shows who carries which risk in the Jupiter structure and what Oracle’s own filings say about the bill it is running up. It then covers why the episode matters beyond one campus, and what businesses buying AI capacity should take from it. For the wider debate about AI financing and how the build-out is paid for, see our analysis of circular financing between Nvidia and its customers.
Table of contents
- What Oracle Sent Blue Owl, and What It Did Not
- Project Jupiter, the Deal Now Testing AI Financing
- Power, Not Demand, Is the AI Financing Problem
- Who Holds the Risk When AI Financing Meets a Delay
- How the Ripples Reached the Wider AI Financing Market
- Oracle’s Balance Sheet and the AI Financing Bill
- What a One-Year Slip Would Cost Oracle
- Blue Owl’s Record in AI Financing
- Community Opposition as an AI Financing Risk
- Is This the AI Financing Crack Investors Feared?
- What It Means for Businesses Buying AI Capacity
- What to Watch Next in AI Financing
- Frequently Asked Questions About AI Financing and Project Jupiter
- References and Further Reading
What Oracle Sent Blue Owl, and What It Did Not
The facts come from three news reports published on the same day, plus statements from Oracle and Blue Owl. None of the companies has published the notice itself, so what follows relies on people familiar with the deal and on what Oracle and Blue Owl have said on the record.
The Bloomberg report and Oracle’s reply
Bloomberg first reported the notice early on 24 September. According to that report, Oracle is not trying to leave. It wants the right to defer payments if Project Jupiter fails to come online in 2028 as planned.
Oracle replied on X at 12:54 UTC without mentioning the notice. “Project Jupiter remains on our planned schedule. We are fully committed to New Mexico and confident in our path forward,” the company posted. It added that more than 3,600 construction workers are on site, that more than 900 joined in August alone, and that it is “reimagining Project Jupiter’s power plan”. When trading opened in New York, Oracle’s shares were about 5% lower.
Later that day, Oracle spokesperson Michael Egbert told The New Mexican that such notices “are commonplace in developments of this scale and are often used to preserve contractual rights among project partners. They do not, by themselves, establish a project delay or change delivery expectations.”
What Reuters’ source added
A Reuters report the same day filled in the contract terms, citing a person familiar with the matter. Securing power for the site is Oracle’s responsibility under the contract. Oracle “cannot terminate the lease under any circumstances”. Oracle is responsible for paying the debt costs, and Blue Owl has about $3 billion of equity in the project.
The same source described the payment mechanics. During development Blue Owl earns a 9% yield on its equity, rising to a levered yield of about 11% once the campus is complete. Invoking force majeure extends the period in which Oracle pays the lower development-stage rent. Blue Owl still receives the higher rent for the originally planned duration, but it starts later.
Why a notice is not a cancellation
Force majeure clauses excuse a party from obligations when events beyond its control make them impossible or impractical to meet. Here, the clause is being used to re-time payments, not to escape them. That distinction is the whole story for AI financing. No cash flow disappears on paper. Some cash flow arrives later than lenders and equity investors modelled, and the question everyone in AI financing is now asking is who absorbs the gap in between.
| Claim | What was reported | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Notice sent | Force majeure notice from Oracle to Stack Infrastructure | Bloomberg, 24 Sep 2026 |
| Purpose | Defer payments if the campus misses its 2028 opening | Bloomberg, via Reuters |
| Cause | Delays securing power to the site | Person familiar, via Reuters |
| Length of delay | About one year | Person familiar, via Reuters |
| Termination | Oracle cannot terminate the lease under any circumstances | Person familiar, via Reuters |
| Oracle’s position | Project “remains on our planned schedule” | Oracle on X, 12:54 UTC |
| Blue Owl’s position | Notice “does not change the financial commitments” | Blue Owl statement, via Reuters |
Project Jupiter, the Deal Now Testing AI Financing
Project Jupiter is one of the largest data center developments announced in the United States, and it sits inside the Stargate programme that OpenAI, SoftBank and Oracle announced with a $500 billion investment commitment. It is designed to draw about 2.45 gigawatts, according to Morningstar, and DCD describes it as a 2.5GW campus of four data center buildings.
A 2.5GW campus in Doña Ana County
The site is at Santa Teresa, near the US border with Mexico and just south of Las Cruces. Stack and BorderPlex Digital Assets have said they could invest up to $165 billion across the whole project. Doña Ana County gave preliminary approval to a $165 billion bond for the development in 2025, according to DCD’s report on Stack joining the project.
Oracle was named as the tenant in January 2026. It will occupy the campus once construction is complete and use it to host artificial intelligence infrastructure for OpenAI, whose models run everything from chat assistants to computer vision services for business customers.
Who owns what in the AI financing chain
The structure is typical of the current wave of AI financing. A developer owned by a private capital firm builds the shell and the power, a consortium of banks lends against the lease, and a cloud provider signs a long lease and fills the halls with chips for an AI lab. The Financial Times reported that the project secured $18 billion in loans from a consortium of banks late in 2025.
That AI financing chain means one AI lab’s demand is funded through at least four balance sheets. OpenAI buys capacity from Oracle, Oracle leases the building from Stack, Stack is owned by Blue Owl, and the banks sit underneath the lot. When one link moves its dates, each of the others has to decide whether it can wait.
The Project Jupiter timeline
| Date | Event |
|---|---|
| 2025 | Stack and BorderPlex Digital Assets unveil the campus; county gives preliminary approval to a $165 billion bond |
| Late 2025 | Project secures $18 billion in bank loans |
| Jan 2026 | Oracle announced as the campus tenant |
| Mar 2026 | State Land Commissioner rejects the first pipeline route across state trust land |
| Apr 2026 | Bloom Energy fuel cells chosen to replace planned gas turbines and diesel generators |
| Jul 2026 | Second pipeline rejection; S&P cuts Oracle to BBB- on 9 July |
| Aug 2026 | Pipeline in-service date moved from 15 August 2026 to 1 February 2027 |
| 10 Sep 2026 | Oracle reports Q1 FY27 with $664 billion of remaining performance obligations |
| 18 Sep 2026 | FT reports the $18 billion of loans quoted at 89 to 91 cents on the dollar |
| 24 Sep 2026 | Bloomberg reports the force majeure notice; Oracle and Blue Owl shares fall |
Power, Not Demand, Is the AI Financing Problem
Nobody in the reporting suggests OpenAI wants less capacity. Oracle’s own quarterly release on 10 September said demand for AI cloud services “continues to grow faster than supply”. The problem is physical: getting enough electricity to a greenfield site in the desert on the timetable the leases assumed.
The Green Chile pipeline
Jupiter was designed to make its own power on site rather than wait for a grid connection. That plan depends on natural gas, delivered by a 17-mile extension that Energy Transfer calls the Green Chile Project. According to DCD’s report on the rejection, it was meant to carry up to 400 million cubic feet of gas a day.
New Mexico’s State Land Office rejected the route across a stretch of state trust land in March 2026 and again in July, citing water use, carbon emissions and a lack of state revenue. Oracle had asked federal regulators to fast-track a review so the pipeline could enter service by 15 August, warning that missing the window would bring much higher costs. In August, Source NM reported that a filing by Energy Transfer’s Transwestern unit had moved the in-service date to 1 February 2027, after the project lost its expedited federal status following challenges by the Sierra Club and other groups.
Bloom fuel cells and the power plan
The gas feeds solid oxide fuel cells rather than turbines. Oracle signed a deal with Bloom Energy for 1.8GW of fuel cells in 2025 and expanded it to 2.8GW in April 2026, with Bloom’s cells replacing the gas turbines and diesel generators previously planned for Jupiter. Fuel cells avoid combustion, but they still burn natural gas, which is why the pipeline became the pressure point for local opponents.
Oracle has since started hedging. Earlier this month it issued a request for proposals for 2GW of new renewable capacity in New Mexico and offered up to $1 million for research into carbon capture at the site, according to DCD. Its X post on 24 September spoke of “reimagining” the power plan. Neither change delivers electrons before the pipeline would.
Why power sits with Oracle
The detail that matters most for AI financing is the one Reuters’ source volunteered: power is Oracle’s responsibility under the contract. In many data center leases, the developer delivers a powered shell and the tenant fits it out. At Jupiter, the tenant appears to carry the power risk, which is why Oracle, not Stack, is the party invoking force majeure over a power delay.
That also explains why the clause matters. If a delay in securing gas counts as an event beyond Oracle’s control, Oracle pays lower rent for longer. If it does not, Oracle would owe the full rent on a building it cannot yet use. The notice preserves Oracle’s argument for the first reading. Whether it holds is a question for the contract, and possibly later for a court, and AI financing desks will be watching the answer.
Who Holds the Risk When AI Financing Meets a Delay
A one-year slip does not cost every party the same. The Jupiter structure spreads the pain unevenly, and the reported terms let us put rough numbers on each share.
Blue Owl’s equity: 9% now, 11% later
Blue Owl’s roughly $3 billion of equity earns about 9% during construction and about 11% once the campus is running. On those reported figures, that is roughly $270 million a year during development and roughly $330 million a year after completion. A one-year delay therefore postpones about $60 million a year of extra return, on these figures, while leaving the total rent schedule intact.
That is why Blue Owl can say, accurately, that the notice “does not change the financial commitments”. The loss is time value, not principal. For a listed asset manager whose shares are priced on fee growth, though, a year of lower yield on a flagship AI financing deal is not trivial.
| Item | Reported figure | Simple arithmetic |
|---|---|---|
| Blue Owl equity | About $3 billion | Base for the yields below |
| Development-stage yield | 9% | About $270 million a year |
| Levered yield on completion | About 11% | About $330 million a year |
| Uplift postponed by a one-year slip | Difference of 2 points | About $60 million, pushed back a year |
| Bank loans | About $18 billion | Quoted at 89 to 91 cents on 18 Sep |
| Mark-to-market gap on the loans | 9 to 11 cents per dollar | About $1.6 billion to $2.0 billion below par |
The banks’ $18 billion
The lenders’ exposure is larger and less comfortable. On 18 September, before the notice was public, the Financial Times reported that the roughly $18 billion of loans were being quoted at 89 to 91 cents on the dollar by syndicate banks including Santander and Jefferies. Reuters’ summary of the FT report said efforts to sell the debt to a wider pool of investors had stalled, leaving banks holding more Oracle-linked project debt than planned.
A quote of 89 to 91 cents on an $18 billion facility implies a mark-to-market gap of roughly $1.6 billion to $2.0 billion. That is not a realised loss, because the loans keep paying if the tenant keeps paying. It is, however, the price at which the market would take the risk off the banks’ hands, and banks that planned to sell down their share now have to carry it and hold capital against it, which leaves less room for the next AI financing request.
Oracle’s side of the ledger
Oracle is responsible for the debt costs and cannot walk away, so the notice is protection at the margin rather than an exit. In the short term it helps Oracle: lower rent on an unfinished building is cheaper than full rent. In the longer term, every month Jupiter is not running is a month of revenue from OpenAI that Oracle cannot recognise. The table below sums up each party’s position in the AI financing structure, and the next section looks at how big Oracle’s number is.
| Party | What it put in | What a one-year slip does to it |
|---|---|---|
| Oracle (tenant) | Long lease, power responsibility, debt costs | Pays lower rent for longer; revenue from the campus starts later |
| Blue Owl / Stack (developer) | About $3 billion of equity | Stays on the 9% yield longer; 11% phase starts later |
| Bank syndicate | About $18 billion of loans | Holds debt quoted below par; harder to sell down |
| OpenAI (end customer) | Capacity contract with Oracle | Waits longer for compute on this site |
| Bloom Energy (supplier) | Fuel cell supply | Deployment waits on the gas supply |
How the Ripples Reached the Wider AI Financing Market
If Jupiter were a one-off, the notice would be a New Mexico story. Reuters’ reporting says it is being read as a precedent. People who work in AI financing are studying it as a real-world example of how contractual protections get tested and who pays when projects run late for reasons outside anyone’s control.
The loans were already under pressure
The loan quotes came first, and they matter more than the share moves. By the time the notice surfaced, the market had already marked Jupiter’s debt below par because of local opposition, the pipeline and Oracle’s creditworthiness. The notice confirmed the specific risk the discount was pricing. For AI financing more broadly, the lesson is that a highly rated tenant is no longer enough on its own. Reuters put it plainly: the participation of firms such as Oracle “isn’t necessarily enough to soothe anxious investors”.
SB Energy and the AI financing IPO window
The first knock-on is SB Energy, the SoftBank-backed developer building a campus in Ohio to serve OpenAI. A person close to its financing told Reuters that Jupiter is reverberating through discussions about that deal. SB Energy filed for a Nasdaq listing under the ticker SBE on 1 September, according to its SEC filings, and amended the filing on 4 and 21 September. It decided this week to delay the offering, according to Reuters, which cited a New York Times report that the listing had been pushed to at least mid-to-late October.
An IPO is the purest test of AI financing appetite, because public investors price the risk in the open. A developer that has not yet switched on a data center is asking the market to value future rent from AI labs. Jupiter has just shown what happens to that rent when power arrives late.
Rates at a two-decade high
The second pressure is the cost of money. Reuters noted that US interest rates have risen to levels last seen two decades ago. The 10-year Treasury yield closed at 5.11% on 23 September, according to Federal Reserve data, the highest close since July 2007. Every point on the benchmark feeds into AI financing costs, and a delay that stretches a construction loan by a year costs more when the base rate is higher.
At the same time, Moody’s projects that AI-related capital spending by the six biggest US technology companies will reach around $1 trillion in 2027, Reuters reported. Lenders are asking whether the AI financing market can absorb that much issuance without wider spreads or tighter terms. Jupiter’s notice gives them a concrete reason to ask for both.
Contracts are changing fast
The third pressure is legal. Lawyers told Reuters that force majeure provisions are becoming more common in data center development agreements. “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,” said Rajat Rana, a New York-based partner at Quinn Emanuel.
Sean McDevitt, a partner at Arthur D. Little, summed up the shift: “The financing side of the AI buildout is starting to ask much harder questions than the demand side. The underlying demand still appears very strong, but investors and lenders are increasingly focused on how risk is allocated.” That sentence is the clearest summary of where AI financing stands after this week.
Oracle's Balance Sheet and the AI Financing Bill
Oracle’s filings show why a delay at one campus draws this much attention from the AI financing market. The company has signed far more business than it can yet deliver, and it is spending ahead of the cash that business will bring in.
$664 billion of backlog, 13% of it next year
Oracle’s 10-Q for the quarter to 31 August 2026 reports remaining performance obligations of $664 billion. Oracle expects to recognise about 13% of that as revenue in the next twelve months, 37% in months 13 to 36, 34% in months 37 to 60 and the remainder after that. Analyst estimates cited in coverage of S&P’s July downgrade put about half of Oracle’s backlog down to OpenAI.
The shape is the point. Only about $86 billion of the backlog is due to become revenue in the next year. Most of it depends on capacity that is still being built, which is exactly the capacity a power delay pushes back, and it is that future revenue AI financing deals are secured against.
$288 billion of leases not yet on the books
The same filing discloses $288 billion of additional lease commitments, “substantially all related to data center arrangements”, that have not started and are not on Oracle’s balance sheet. They are expected to commence between the second quarter of fiscal 2027 and fiscal 2029, for terms of 15 to 19 years. Jupiter is one of the campuses behind that figure, and each of those leases underpins someone else’s AI financing.
One detail in the filings deserves attention. In the 10-Q for the quarter to 28 February 2026, Oracle expected these leases to commence by fiscal 2028. In the annual report filed in June, the far end of the window moved to fiscal 2029, and it stayed there in September. That does not prove any single project is late, but it shows the delivery window drifting to the right while the commitments grow.
Capex ahead of cash
Oracle spent $28.5 billion on capital expenditure in the quarter to August, against operating cash flow of $23.1 billion. That left free cash flow of about minus $5.4 billion. Operating cash flow included $11.4 billion of customer prepayments with a significant financing component, so part of the cash came from customers paying early for capacity Oracle has yet to deliver, a quieter form of AI financing.
To fund the gap, Oracle sold $20 billion of new shares through an at-the-market programme during the quarter, issuing 141 million shares for net proceeds of $19.9 billion. Its notes payable and other borrowings stood at $125.3 billion at 31 August. The quarterly release said new contracts were structured so there is “no incremental impact on its plans to raise capital”.
The credit rating
S&P cut Oracle’s rating from BBB to BBB-, the lowest investment-grade notch, on 9 July, with a stable outlook, heise reported. The agency forecast a free operating cash flow deficit of almost $42 billion for fiscal 2027 and described OpenAI as a central credit risk. One more notch would take Oracle into high-yield territory, which would raise the cost of every future AI financing round the company runs.
What a One-Year Slip Would Cost Oracle
The immediate effect on Oracle’s results is small. The long-term effect depends on whether Jupiter is an isolated delay or the first of several, and on how AI financing markets price the difference.
Morningstar’s $25 billion estimate
Morningstar analyst Luke Yang wrote on 24 September that Jupiter’s 2.45GW of capacity means Oracle could need to push back the timeline for “$25 billion or more of its revenue”. That is a sizeable share of Morningstar’s forecasts for Oracle’s cloud infrastructure revenue of $86 billion for fiscal 2028 and $136 billion for fiscal 2029. On those figures, $25 billion equals about 29% of the fiscal 2028 forecast and about 18% of the fiscal 2029 forecast.
Yang kept Morningstar’s $220 fair value estimate, since the delay is only a possibility, but flagged the rating risk. “Oracle banks on cash inflows from artificial intelligence data centers to keep its leverage in check,” the note says. It also pointed out that pure cloud providers such as Oracle and CoreWeave rely on third-party operators to build the power shell, and that a delivery delay at CoreWeave in November 2025 sent that stock down 16%.
William Blair’s view
Brokerage William Blair told Reuters it expects minimal short-term impact. “Practically, fiscal 2027 should not be affected, since Jupiter contributes no revenue this year.” On the 10 September earnings call, co-CEO Clay Magouyrk said that “in terms of construction, data center is definitely on track” in New Mexico, and that neither of the sites discussed would affect fiscal 2027 guidance, according to a TIKR summary of the call.
How the market reacted
| Stock | Close 23 Sep | Open 24 Sep | Close 24 Sep | Day change |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Oracle (ORCL) | $144.56 | $137.32 | $139.54 | -3.5% |
| Blue Owl (OWL) | $9.60 | $9.34 | $9.25 | -3.6% |
Oracle’s close of $139.54 left it about 55% below its closing high of $313.00 on 16 October 2025. Much of the AI financing premium the market once gave Oracle has already gone, which is partly why a single notice moved the stock by less than the headlines implied.
Blue Owl's Record in AI Financing
Blue Owl has been one of the most active private capital firms in AI financing for data centers, and Jupiter is not the first time its role in an Oracle project has made news.
Michigan, December 2025
In December 2025 the FT reported that Blue Owl would not back a planned $10 billion, 1GW data center for OpenAI in Saline Township, Michigan. CNBC reported that a person familiar with Blue Owl’s plans said it pulled out over unfavourable debt terms and repayment structure, and concern that local politics would delay construction. Oracle said the developer, Related Digital, had simply chosen a different equity partner. Oracle shares fell 5% that day.
At the time, the FT described Blue Owl as the primary investor in Oracle’s US data center projects, including a $15 billion site in Abilene, Texas and the $18 billion New Mexico site. Reuters now describes the Michigan campus as a planned $16 billion project that has faced opposition from residents.
Lancaster and CoreWeave
Reuters also reported that earlier this year Blue Owl struggled to syndicate financing for a $4 billion data center project in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, anchored by CoreWeave. Taken together with Jupiter’s loan quotes, that suggests the bottleneck in AI financing has moved. The equity is available. The harder task is selling the debt on to investors who want a clean, on-time asset.
Why Blue Owl says nothing has changed
“Blue Owl, STACK Infrastructure and Oracle remain fully aligned on Project Jupiter. This notice does not change the financial commitments to this multiyear project,” the company said in a statement to Reuters. On the reported terms that is defensible: the lease cannot be terminated, the rent schedule survives, and Oracle carries the debt costs. What changes is timing and sentiment, and in an AI financing market this dependent on refinancing, those two things are closely linked.
Community Opposition as an AI Financing Risk
Power is the immediate cause at Jupiter, but the power problem grew out of local and state opposition. That kind of risk is getting harder for AI financing teams to model.
What Data Center Watch counts
Data Center Watch, a project of 10a Labs, says at least 45 projects worth about $68 billion were blocked or delayed by local opposition in the second quarter of 2026. That followed 75 projects worth about $130 billion in the first quarter. The group now counts 843 local opposition groups across 49 states, and says 30 statehouses introduced or adopted measures on data center siting, electricity, water or cost-sharing.
Reuters listed other examples: opposition to Meta’s project in El Paso, Texas and to Related Digital’s Oracle-focused campus in Michigan, and the July termination of Blackstone-owned QTS’s Digital Gateway project in Virginia after years of planning. We covered how some communities are choosing regulation over outright bans in our report on data center regulation.
Jupiter’s local fights
At Jupiter, opponents have challenged water and air-quality permits as well as the pipeline. The New Mexican reported that the state Supreme Court paused permitting proceedings before allowing them to continue on 17 September. “New Mexico has already given over 200 million gallons of our fresh water to construct something that is not only terrible for our environment but also appears to be on shaky grounds financially,” said Colin Cox, an attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity.
For AI financing, the lesson is that permits are no longer a box ticked early in a project. They can be reopened while construction is under way, and every reopening affects the date on which rent begins.
Is This the AI Financing Crack Investors Feared?
The same facts support two readings, and both deserve a hearing.
The case for calm
Oracle has not walked away and cannot. The rent schedule survives. Blue Owl’s equity is intact and still earning 9%. Demand for AI capacity has not weakened, and Oracle booked more than $30 billion of new AI cloud contracts in its latest quarter. William Blair sees no impact on this fiscal year. On this reading, force majeure is a routine legal tool doing its job, and the share moves were an overreaction by a market already nervous about AI financing.
The case for concern
A tenant with a BBB- rating is re-timing payments on a flagship project whose debt is already quoted below par. The cause is power, which is a constraint across the industry rather than one site’s bad luck. Oracle’s lease commitments are growing while their start dates drift, and its cash flow is negative. On this reading, Jupiter is the first public test of a risk that sits in many similar contracts, and the market is right to reprice AI financing before the next test arrives.
Our view is that both readings are partly right. The notice itself is not a crack. What it exposed is that the AI financing chain from lab to bank depends on a physical input, electricity, that no party in the chain fully controls. That exposure was always there. It is now priced.
What It Means for Businesses Buying AI Capacity
Most businesses will never sign a 2GW lease or arrange AI financing on this scale, but the same risk runs through smaller contracts for cloud capacity, colocation and AI services. The Jupiter episode is a useful checklist.
Ask who holds the power risk
When a supplier promises capacity on a new site, ask who is responsible for power and what happens if it is late. At Jupiter the tenant carried that risk. In a colocation or GPU-hosting contract it may sit with the provider, with you, or nowhere clearly. Our data center operations team sees this gap often in contracts written before power became the binding constraint.
Read your own force majeure clause
Force majeure clauses are “massively different” from a year ago, in Rana’s words. Check whether yours lets a supplier suspend service or delay delivery for grid, fuel or permitting problems, and whether you get fees back or credits in return. The panel below shows the kind of wording buyers are now asking for. It is an illustration, not legal advice.
“The Supplier may not rely on force majeure for any failure or delay in securing grid connection, fuel supply or on-site generation where the Supplier has assumed responsibility for power procurement under this Agreement. Where a force majeure event delays the Service Commencement Date by more than 90 days, the Customer may terminate the affected order without charge and receive a refund of all prepaid fees for undelivered capacity.”
Watch concentration
A central worry in S&P’s downgrade was Oracle’s dependence on OpenAI, which analysts estimate accounts for about half its backlog. Buyers can apply the same test to their own suppliers. The same AI financing chain that links OpenAI to Oracle’s banks can reach you. If your AI provider depends on one cloud, and that cloud depends on one lab’s contracts and a handful of campuses, a delay at one site can reach you. A structured vendor management review should ask about the supplier’s supplier, not just the contract in front of you.
Plan for capacity that arrives late
Treat announced capacity as a forecast, not a delivery date, because the AI financing behind it assumes dates that power may not meet. Keep a second region or provider qualified for critical workloads, and avoid prepaying for capacity on sites that are not yet powered. Oracle’s own customers prepaid $11.4 billion in a single quarter. Prepayments are part of how AI financing works now, and they also leave customers exposed if the build-out slips.
| Question for your supplier | Why it matters after Jupiter |
|---|---|
| Is the site already powered, or waiting on grid or fuel? | Power, not construction, caused the Jupiter delay |
| Who carries the power risk under your contracts? | At Jupiter the tenant did, which is why it invoked force majeure |
| What does force majeure excuse, and what do we get back? | Clauses are changing fast and increasingly cover power |
| How concentrated is your own customer and site base? | Concentration was central to S&P’s downgrade of Oracle |
| Are prepayments refundable if delivery slips? | Prepaid capacity is exposed to the same delays |
What to Watch Next in AI Financing
Several dates over the next few months will show whether Jupiter stays an isolated AI financing case.
The pipeline’s February date
The Green Chile pipeline’s in-service date of 1 February 2027 is the practical milestone. If it holds and the fuel cells follow, the one-year delay reported by Reuters may shrink. If it slips again, the gap between Oracle’s “planned schedule” and the reported delay will become harder to bridge.
The loan price
The quoted price of Jupiter’s $18 billion of loans is the cleanest live measure of how lenders see the project. A move back towards par would suggest the notice was absorbed. A move lower would signal that the AI financing chill is spreading from sentiment into the terms of new deals.
SB Energy’s listing
SB Energy’s delayed IPO will show whether public investors will fund a developer whose rent depends on AI labs. A successful listing in October would ease the pressure. A further delay or a sharply lower valuation would confirm that Jupiter changed the terms for AI financing.
Oracle’s next quarter
Oracle’s second-quarter results, expected in December, will update the backlog, the lease commitments and the capex figures above. The lease commencement window is worth checking. So is any new language about force majeure or power delays, which did not appear in the September 10-Q.
For more on the power bottleneck behind all of this, see our coverage of Emerald AI’s work to find grid capacity for data centers and of Crusoe’s $3.9 billion raise for data centers.
Frequently Asked Questions About AI Financing and Project Jupiter
What is Project Jupiter?
Project Jupiter is a planned 2.5GW data center campus of about 1,400 acres in Doña Ana County, New Mexico. It is being developed by Stack Infrastructure, owned by Blue Owl, with BorderPlex Digital Assets. Oracle is the tenant and will use it to host AI computing capacity for OpenAI as part of the Stargate programme.
What is a force majeure notice?
It is a formal notice that a party is relying on a contract clause excusing it from obligations because of events beyond its control. Oracle is using it to extend the period in which it pays lower construction-stage rent, not to leave the lease.
Why did Oracle send it?
Reuters’ source said it was because of delays in securing power for the site. Under the contract, power is Oracle’s responsibility. The route for the gas pipeline meant to fuel the site’s Bloom fuel cells has been rejected twice by the State Land Office, and its in-service date has moved to 1 February 2027.
Is Project Jupiter delayed?
Oracle says it “remains on our planned schedule”. A person familiar with the deal told Reuters it is being delayed by about a year. Oracle’s spokesperson said force majeure notices do not, by themselves, establish a delay.
Why does it matter for AI financing?
Jupiter’s AI financing combines about $3 billion of Blue Owl equity with about $18 billion of bank loans, with repayment tied to Oracle’s rent. If rent is deferred, investors and lenders wait longer. Reuters reported that the notice is already affecting talks on other deals, including SB Energy’s Ohio campus.
What should businesses buying cloud or AI services do?
Check who carries power risk in your contracts, read your force majeure clause, look at how concentrated your suppliers are, and avoid prepaying for capacity on sites that are not yet powered. Keep a fallback for critical workloads.
References and Further Reading
Analysis: Oracle, Blue Owl project delay sends ripples through AI financing, sources say (Reuters)
Oracle triggers force majeure on data center project over power delays, source says (Reuters)
Oracle’s $18 billion data center debt under pressure, FT reports (Reuters)
Oracle statement on Project Jupiter (Oracle on X)
Oracle sends force majeure notice to Project Jupiter developers (The New Mexican)
Oracle: Data center force majeure implies possibility of $25 billion revenue delay (Morningstar)
Oracle Form 10-Q for the quarter ended 31 August 2026 (SEC EDGAR)
Oracle announces Q1 FY27 results (SEC EDGAR)
Oracle issues force majeure notice to Blue Owl following series of setbacks at Project Jupiter (DCD)
New Mexico regulators reject natural gas pipeline for Project Jupiter (DCD)
Stack joins multi-billion-dollar data center and microgrid project in New Mexico (DCD)
Oracle issues RFP for 2GW of new renewable capacity in New Mexico (DCD)
Proposed gas pipeline for Project Jupiter data center delayed to 2027, filings show (Source NM)
S&P downgrades Oracle to BBB-, only one notch above junk level (heise online)
Data Center Watch report, Q2 2026 (Data Center Watch)
Oracle stock dips as Blue Owl pulls out of funding $10 billion data center (CNBC)
SB Energy registration statements (SEC EDGAR)
10-year Treasury constant maturity rate (FRED)
Oracle’s Project Jupiter loans are trading at 90 cents (TIKR)
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