Oracle moves to protect itself if the Stargate campus in New Mexico slips

Oracle sent the force majeure notice to STACK Infrastructure, which Blue Owl Capital owns. The notice covers Project Jupiter, a data center campus in New Mexico that is being built as part of the Stargate initiative Oracle, OpenAI and SoftBank announced at the start of Donald Trump's second term. Bloomberg reported the notice first. Oracle does not intend to walk away from its role as the main tenant. The notice would let the company postpone payments if the site misses its 2028 target.

Oracle says it does not expect a delay. "Project Jupiter remains on track with our plan," a company representative told CNBC. Michael Egbert, a spokesperson for Oracle, added that projects of this scale routinely use such notices, and that partners protect their contractual rights this way. Blue Owl said the notice does not change the financial commitments attached to the multi-year project.

The problems on the ground are not purely formal. The campus is meant to handle 2.45 GW, and the power is to come from Bloom Energy fuel cells. A steady gas supply is therefore a necessary condition for the schedule. The Energy Transfer pipeline has been delayed by nearly six months, to 1 February 2027, after regulators repeatedly refused to issue permits. In August Bloomberg described a change to the route after those refusals. A separate environmental permit for the fuel cell system is still waiting on a decision that the state environment department is due to issue by 23 November.

The scale of the commitments explains why investors are nervous. In the first quarter Oracle spent 28.5 billion dollars on investments, against 8.5 billion a year earlier, and the company is holding to its forecast of 90 to 95 billion dollars in capital spending for fiscal year 2027. The share price fell about 4 percent on Thursday. RBC Capital Markets analyst Rishi Jaluria wrote that the force majeure notice "points to a change in the internal assessment of the project's execution risk, sufficient for the company to seek legal protection."

The wider picture matters too. According to Bloomberg Economics, capital spending by the world's 50 largest companies on technology exceeded 500 billion dollars in 2025 and for the first time in history surpassed their cash reserves. In 2026 technology companies are therefore borrowing heavily: their net bond issuance doubled year on year and far outpaced the volume of stock market debuts.

A force majeure notice does not mean the contract is broken. It is a risk management instrument that allows payments to be shifted and liability to be limited if the schedule is not met. For the market, though, the signal is what counts: the construction of a campus this large depends on factors the tenant does not control, from environmental permits to pipeline deadlines. Once the cloud provider itself publicly shields against a delay, investors start pricing execution risk, not just the scale of the contracts. That explains why the share price fell even though the declared schedule has not changed.