What is Project Jupiter? Why Oracle's biggest AI bet is waiting on a gas pipe

Picture driving west out of El Paso, Texas, into New Mexico. You would pass a huge construction site. About 3,500 workers are putting up four giant buildings there. The buildings sit on 1,400 acres of desert. An acre is about three-quarters the size of a football field, so that is more than 1,000 football fields of land.

When the buildings are finished, they are supposed to use 2.45 gigawatts of electricity. A gigawatt is a huge unit of power. Bloomberg reported that 2.45 gigawatts is roughly enough electricity to run 1.8 million homes at the same time. That is how much power four buildings full of computers can need.

This place is called Project Jupiter. It is one of the biggest pieces of a much bigger plan called Stargate. Stargate is a plan to build artificial intelligence computers across the country. President Trump announced Stargate at the White House together with three men: Larry Ellison, Sam Altman and Masayoshi Son.

AI tools like ChatGPT run on huge rooms full of computer chips. Those rooms are called data centers. A data center needs two things above everything else: computer chips, and a steady supply of electricity.

The company that is going to rent and run Jupiter is Oracle. Oracle is a big tech company. It is betting heavily on renting out computer power for AI.

On September 24, 2026, Oracle sent a letter to the company that owns and is building Jupiter. This was not a casual note. It was a force majeure notice. Force majeure is a legal term for an event outside your control, so serious that it can excuse you from keeping a promise in a contract on time. Sending that letter was Oracle telling its own partner, in writing, that the power at Jupiter might not be ready on schedule, and that Oracle might not pay full rent on time because of it.

Oracle says the letter means nothing. Oracle spokesman Michael Egbert said, "Project Jupiter remains on our planned schedule." But the people who lent money to build Jupiter were already acting nervous before the letter even went out. The Financial Times reported that six days before the letter, banks were quoting the $18 billion construction loan for Jupiter at about 90 cents on the dollar. That means if you had a right to be paid one dollar from that loan, the market thought it was only worth buying for about 90 cents. A loan trading below its full value is a sign that buyers see real risk of not being paid back in full.

Why does this letter matter so much? It is the first time any company at the center of the AI building boom has put a worry like this in writing to its own partners. And the reason is not a shortage of computer chips, and it is not a failed AI model. The reason is far more ordinary: a 17-mile gas pipe that a New Mexico state office would not let cross a small strip of its land.

The key thing to remember: Jupiter is a giant AI building that cannot run without power, and Oracle warned in writing that the power might be late.

Think of Project Jupiter like one giant apartment building. It is being built for a single tenant. That tenant already has one customer lined up to fill every room before the building even opens.

The owner and builder is a company called STACK Infrastructure. STACK is a data center company owned by funds managed by an investment firm named Blue Owl Capital. A local developer, BorderPlex Digital Assets, is also a partner in the project. It is important to hold onto this: STACK owns the buildings. Oracle does not.

Oracle is the tenant. A tenant is the one who rents, not the one who owns. Oracle signed a long lease, meaning a long-term contract to rent the buildings, and Oracle is the one who will fill them with computer chips and run them.

Then Oracle turns around and rents that computer power to OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT. So Oracle sits in the middle of the deal. On one side, Oracle owes rent to STACK, the owner. On the other side, Oracle is waiting on OpenAI to pay it. That is a fine place to stand, as long as the building actually opens on time and OpenAI keeps paying.

Now follow the money that built it. About 20 banks lined up together to lend $18 billion. This is called a construction loan, which is a loan used to pay for building something before it exists. Bloomberg and Reuters both reported that figure. Blue Owl itself put in about $3 billion of its own money. Reuters reported that while the buildings are still being built, Blue Owl earns about 9% a year on the money it put in. Once the buildings are finished and running, that rate rises to about 11% a year.

The local government helped too. Doña Ana County, where the site sits, voted 4 to 1 among its commissioners in September 2025 to approve a big tax break. The tool the county used is called industrial revenue bonds. They are a way New Mexico counties give big projects a tax break. The county approved $165 billion of them, which is the amount the companies expect to invest in the project. This tax break takes the property off the normal property-tax rolls for up to 30 years. In exchange, El Paso Matters reported, the companies agreed to pay the county a flat $12 million a year instead of regular property taxes.

That same deal set two deadlines. The companies promised to switch on the first phase of the campus sometime between October and December of 2026. And they promised to finish the entire campus by the third quarter of 2028.

Step back and see where Jupiter fits into the bigger picture. Stargate itself, the larger AI building plan, was announced on January 21, 2025. It was described as $500 billion of AI building spread over four years. Jupiter came later. Bloomberg reported that Jupiter is one of five U.S. sites inside a separate $400 billion deal that OpenAI signed with Oracle and SoftBank.

The key thing to remember: Oracle is not the owner; it is the renter in the middle, owing rent on one side and waiting to be paid by OpenAI on the other.

A campus that uses as much electricity as a mid-sized city cannot simply plug into the local power lines. The power lines near Jupiter are not big enough to carry that much electricity. So from the start, the plan was to make the power right there, on site.

The first plan was gas turbines. A turbine is a machine like a small jet engine. It burns natural gas to spin a part that makes electricity.

In April 2026, Oracle and BorderPlex switched that plan to fuel cells made by a company called Bloom Energy. A fuel cell still runs on gas, but it does not burn the gas. Instead, it uses a chemical reaction to turn gas into electricity. Searchlight New Mexico reported that this switch cut the campus's expected greenhouse gas output from about 14 million tons a year down to about 10 million tons a year. That is a cut of about 28%. Ten million tons a year is still an enormous amount of pollution, and fuel cells still need a steady supply of gas to run.

That gas was supposed to arrive through a brand-new pipeline called the Green Chile Lateral. It is a 24-inch-wide pipe, about 17 miles long, being built by a company connected to Energy Transfer. Most of its route crosses private land and federal land, which is not a problem. The trouble is about one mile of it, split into two separate stretches, which crosses state trust land. State trust land is land that New Mexico holds specifically to raise money for the state's public schools. To cross even a small stretch of that land, a company needs a right-of-way permit, which is official permission to build across someone else's land, from the New Mexico State Land Office.

The State Land Office said no, twice. On March 20, 2026, it told Energy Transfer's companies that their permit applications were canceled. The company asked the office to reconsider. On July 14, the office said no again, in a letter posted on its own website. The office's reasoning was about money for schools: crossing the land would earn the school trust only a one-time payment of about $32,000. On top of that one-time payment, the deal would only bring in about $43,000 a year. New Mexico's Land Commissioner, Stephanie Garcia Richard, told the trade publication NGI that "advancing the massive use of gas for a project of this scale is simply not in the best interest of the trust."

That refusal had a real effect on the schedule. Source NM reported that, in Energy Transfer's own federal filing, the pipeline's start date moved from about August 15, 2026, all the way to February 1, 2027. Some reports say the company is now trying to find a way around the state land instead of crossing it, but that has not been confirmed.

The pipe is not the only permit still open. The fuel cells also need an air-quality permit, which is a government approval that the pollution they release is within legal limits. That permit is still waiting at the New Mexico Environment Department, with a decision due by November 23. The case had its own detour: the state Supreme Court paused it in August, then let it move forward again on September 17. The officer in charge of the hearing stepped aside, and a new one, retired federal judge James Browning, was named in early October.

On top of all that, there is politics. Water use and air pollution have turned this project into a fight ahead of New Mexico's November 3 election. Source NM reported that Deb Haaland, the Democratic candidate for governor, has said that if she wins she would sign an order pausing new large data centers. She has not said whether that pause would reach Jupiter specifically.

Put it together: one of the biggest AI building projects in the entire country is sitting and waiting on a pipe, a permit, and the outcome of an election.

The key thing to remember: Without the gas pipe and the air permit, Jupiter has no power, and without power the buildings cannot earn anything.

Force majeure is a French phrase. It means "greater force." Lawyers put a force majeure clause into most big contracts. It covers events that nobody could control, like wars, floods or natural disasters. If one of those events happens, the clause can excuse a company from a deadline, or from a payment, for a while.

Oracle did not walk away from the deal. It did not cancel its lease. It is still the main tenant at Jupiter. What the letter actually does is reserve a right. That means it locks in an option Oracle can use later, if it needs to.

That right could be worth a lot, because of how the rent works. Right now, before the buildings are finished, Oracle pays a lower, early-stage rent. Once the buildings are running, Oracle's full rent is supposed to start.

Now add the letter. Bloomberg reported, citing a person familiar with the matter, that Oracle could push back the start of its full rent by up to three years. That only happens if both Oracle and the owner agree a power-related force majeure event really happened. Until that is settled, Reuters reported, Oracle keeps paying the cheaper, early rent.

Bloomberg added one catch. Even if Oracle wins that delay, it is not sure to free Oracle from anything. Oracle would still owe full rent for the whole lease once payments begin. It would just start owing it later.

Oracle's own public line is that the letter is routine paperwork. Egbert said, "Force-majeure notices are commonplace in developments of this scale. They do not, by themselves, establish a project delay." Blue Owl, the owner's investor, said the notice "does not change the financial commitments to this multi-year project."

There is one part Oracle does not lead with when it talks about the letter. Reuters reported that under Oracle's own contract, Oracle carries full responsibility for securing power at the site. That is Oracle's job, written into the deal. And Oracle's own announcement from April 2026 said Oracle "will continue to bear all energy costs for Project Jupiter." So Oracle is pointing at a power problem as an event outside its control, on the one job the contract already made Oracle's responsibility. Julien Simon, a writer who covers the AI industry, made exactly that point in a piece titled "An Act of God With Letterhead."

Think about your own apartment lease. You do not send your landlord a letter warning about a flood you think will never happen. A company sends a letter like that because it wants a right sitting in its pocket, ready, before it actually needs it. The timing here is tight. On September 10, Oracle co-CEO Clay Magouyrk told investors the data center was "definitely on track." Just fourteen days later, on September 24, the force majeure letter went out.

The key thing to remember: The letter does not cancel anything; it keeps a door open for Oracle to pay full rent years later, over a problem that was Oracle's job to solve.

Building AI data centers costs an enormous amount of money up front, long before any customer pays a cent. If you buy a house before you manage to sell your old one, you know this squeeze already. Oracle has to buy the computer chips and sign the building leases years before OpenAI's rent money actually arrives.

Start with the real numbers. In the three months that ended August 31, 2026, Oracle took in $23.1 billion in cash from running its normal business. In that same three months, it spent $28.5 billion building and buying equipment. Subtract those two: Oracle was about $5 billion short, in a single quarter alone. Zoom out to Oracle's whole last fiscal year, and the gap was about $24 billion. A fiscal year is a company's own 12-month money year, which does not have to start in January. Now look forward: S&P, one of the big companies that grades how safe debt is, expects the gap to widen to about $42 billion this year, because Oracle plans to spend $90 billion to $95 billion on building in that time.

Oracle fills a gap that size with other people's money, in two ways.

First, it sells new shares of its own stock. This year it sold $19.9 billion worth of new shares. Filing Insights, a research newsletter, found that Oracle started that stock sale one day after Larry Ellison set up his own separate plan to sell his personal shares. Nothing proves the two moves were connected, but the timing is close. If you already own Oracle stock, each new share Oracle sells makes your own slice of the company a little smaller, because there are now more slices to divide the same company into.

Second, it borrows. By the end of August 2026, Oracle's own quarterly filing says it owed about $125 billion in notes and loans. Notes are IOUs that investors can buy and sell. Add in the leases that are already sitting on its books, and the total climbs to about $169 billion.

But the much bigger number is tucked into a footnote, not the headline debt figure. Oracle's August quarterly report says the company has signed another $288 billion of leases, described as "substantially all related to data center arrangements," that have not even started yet. That number stays hidden for a simple reason. A company keeps an official list of what it owns and what it owes, called the balance sheet. Accounting rules do not put a lease on that list as debt until the lease actually begins. These particular leases are set to start sometime between now and 2029, and once they start, they will run for 15 to 19 years each. Compare the two numbers: $288 billion of leases not yet counted is more than double the roughly $125 billion Oracle has already borrowed. The number most people quote when they talk about Oracle's debt is the smaller one.

Lenders have noticed the strain, and it shows up in four separate warning signs.

1. Credit rating. In July, S&P cut Oracle's credit rating to BBB-minus. That grade sits just one single step above "junk." Junk is the label for bonds that carry a real risk of not being paid back in full. Moody's, a different rating company, now has Oracle on a negative outlook, meaning it is watching for a possible cut too.
2. Bond interest rates. A bond is essentially a loan that investors can buy and sell. Around September 24, some of Oracle's long-term bonds hit a record yield of about 8.3%, in market data that Bloomberg relayed. A yield is the interest rate a buyer demands in exchange for holding the bond. A higher yield means lenders are demanding more pay in exchange for taking on more risk.
3. Default insurance. Investors can buy insurance, called a credit default swap, that pays out if a company fails to pay its debts. In September, the price of that insurance on Oracle's debt rose above 2 percentage points a year. That means insuring every $100 of Oracle's debt cost more than $2 a year. Fortune reported that insurance has not been that expensive on Oracle since the 2008 financial crisis.
4. Loan price. The Jupiter construction loan tells the same story. On September 18, the Financial Times reported that banks including Santander and Jefferies were quoting the $18 billion in Jupiter loans at only 89 to 91 cents on the dollar.

The price fell because the banks got stuck. They had planned to sell pieces of the loan to other investors. Not enough buyers showed up. So the banks ended up holding more of the loan than they wanted.

If you held a piece of that loan, you could sell it for only about 90 cents for every dollar you were owed. Buyers pay less when they think they might not get all their money back.

The timing matters too. That 90-cent price showed up six days before Oracle's letter. So lenders were worried first. The letter only confirmed what they already suspected.

It is also important to be fair about what this is not. Bloomberg reported that the letter "does not constitute an event of default" on the loan, meaning it is not a default, and the loan is still being paid on schedule. A 90-cent quote is a price investors are willing to pay, not proof of an actual loss. But prices like that are usually where real trouble shows up first, before anything officially breaks.

The key thing to remember: Lenders were already nervous about Oracle before the letter, and the biggest bill, the $288 billion of unstarted leases, does not even show up in the debt number most people quote.

In September 2025, Oracle and OpenAI signed a cloud computing deal. The Wall Street Journal reported it at $300 billion, spread over five years, starting in 2027. One single contract like that changed the shape of Oracle's whole future business overnight.

When a company signs a deal to do work in the future, the total money it expects from signed-but-not-yet-done work is called its backlog. Oracle now says its backlog is $664 billion. Back in July, when S&P cut Oracle's credit rating, the backlog stood at $638 billion, and heise reported that analysts estimated about half of that backlog was owed by OpenAI alone. S&P itself called OpenAI a "central credit risk" for Oracle, meaning OpenAI's own ability to pay is one of the biggest dangers hanging over Oracle's finances.

That one customer matters this much for a simple reason. If you are counting on Oracle's backlog, you are really mostly counting on OpenAI. And OpenAI pays its bills largely with money it raises from investors, not from profits yet. In 2025, OpenAI also announced huge deals with Nvidia, AMD, Broadcom and CoreWeave. To pay all of those bills, OpenAI depends on new funding rounds, backing from SoftBank, its deal with Microsoft, and maybe a stock market listing someday.

Put the two companies together and you can see the shape of the risk. Oracle borrows money to build computers for a customer. That customer, OpenAI, pays its bills mostly with money raised from its own investors. Each side's numbers look fine only as long as the other side keeps going.

The key thing to remember: A big part of Oracle's future depends on one customer, and that customer depends on investors.

Larry Ellison co-founded Oracle, and he is its chairman today. According to Oracle's proxy statement, a document companies file with regulators, filed in late September 2026, Ellison owns about 38% of the entire company. In actual shares, that is about 1.16 billion shares.

The risky part is what he did with them. Ellison has pledged 413 million of those shares as collateral for personal loans. Pledging means using the stock as backup, so if he cannot repay the loan, the lender can take the shares instead. That 413 million is more than a third of his entire stake in Oracle. It is also 67 million more shares than he had pledged a year earlier. At Oracle's closing stock price on September 25, those pledged shares were worth about $9.2 billion. Oracle's board says the loans fund Ellison's "outside personal business ventures." CNBC has reported that Ellison has helped finance the Skydance and Paramount merger, which is run by his son David Ellison, and that he is backing a bid for Warner Bros. Discovery.

This matters extra because of a rule Oracle itself has. Oracle's own policy bans every employee and every director from pledging company stock as collateral, with exactly one exception. Oracle's proxy summary spells that exception out directly: the policy is "applicable to all employees and directors except Mr. Ellison."

Why should anyone else care about one man's personal loans? Because a loan backed by stock is only as safe as the stock's price. If Oracle's stock price falls far enough, the pledged shares stop covering the loan. At that point, the lender can demand more cash or more shares to make up the difference. That demand is called a margin call. If the borrower cannot meet it, the lender is allowed to sell the pledged shares itself.

Walk through how that chain could play out, step by step. First, Oracle's stock price falls. Second, a lender asks Ellison for more collateral. Third, if Ellison cannot or will not provide it, hundreds of millions of his shares could be sold onto the market all at once. Fourth, selling that many shares at once pushes the stock price down even further. Fifth, that drop weakens whatever collateral is left, which can trigger yet another margin call. This is not a far-off, hypothetical picture: Oracle's stock was trading around $145 in early October, which is about 55% below its high of $322.54 set the previous fall.

Oracle's board has an answer to this worry. It says none of Ellison's pledged shares sit in a margin account, and it says it "believes that Mr. Ellison has the financial capacity to repay his personal term loans without resorting to the pledged shares." Given that Ellison is one of the richest people on Earth, that may well be true. Even so, it is still a bet that rests on one man's other businesses holding up, sitting underneath the stock of a company that is already borrowing record amounts of money.

Then there was a separate sale plan, on top of the pledged shares. On June 22, Ellison set up a plan to sell up to 50 million Oracle shares, worth about $7.5 billion, with a deadline before October 24. Plans like this, called 10b5-1 plans, let company executives schedule stock sales ahead of time, on a fixed calendar. CNBC noted something unusual about this one: according to FactSet's records, Ellison had not sold more than 25,000 shares at once at any point this century, before this plan.

Shareholders only learned about the plan on Friday evening, September 11, when it showed up buried in one of Oracle's regular quarterly filings. The very next day, a Saturday, Oracle announced that Ellison had already canceled it. The company said, "No Oracle stock was sold under the plan," and that Ellison "has no other plans to sell." By the time of that cancellation, Reuters reported, Oracle's stock price was already more than 18% below where it had closed on the last trading day before the plan was first set up. Reuters tied that drop to worries about Oracle's spending and cash, not to the sale plan itself.

So in the end, no shares were actually sold. But a plan like that is still a signal, even when it is canceled. The person who knows Oracle best, the same man asking investors to back one of the most aggressive AI building projects in American business, had quietly put himself in position to sell $7.5 billion worth of his own stock. Twelve days after he canceled that plan, the force majeure letter went out.

The key thing to remember: Ellison's pledged shares tie his personal loans to Oracle's stock price, so a falling price could force sales that push it lower still.

Lay the whole chain out from the bottom up, because each layer only holds up if the layer above it pays.

1. The banks get paid only if the builder, STACK, collects rent.
2. The builder collects rent only if Oracle pays.
3. Oracle pays only if OpenAI pays Oracle for computing power.
4. OpenAI pays only if its own investors keep writing it checks.
5. And none of this really gets going until Oracle's full rent starts, which does not happen until the campus actually switches on.

If you pull out any single layer, every layer underneath it feels the loss. Picture it like a stack of chairs, where each chair is resting on the chair above it instead of the ground. It holds together as long as nobody moves. Right now, the entire stack is resting on something far plainer than computer chips or AI models: a gas pipe in the desert that is now due February 1, 2027, and an air permit due by November 23.

To be fair, nothing here says Ellison did anything illegal. The point is simply how much of this giant structure rests on a small number of people's choices. Billions of dollars in debt, buildings, and stock value can all move based on what one man decides to do with his own shares.

It is also worth noticing where this warning came from. Most earlier warnings about the AI building boom came from short sellers, who are investors that make money when a stock goes down, and from analysts and commentators. All of them were standing outside the actual deals. This warning is different. It came from inside: a company in the middle of the chain told its own partners, in writing, that one piece might not arrive on time.

The chain could unravel one step at a time. This is a list of things that could happen, not a prediction that they will. If the power is late, Oracle's rent-delay right could kick in. If rent gets delayed, the owner's payout gets delayed too, and the construction loan stays under stress. If Oracle's costs keep running ahead of the cash it brings in, rating agencies could cut Oracle's grade all the way to junk. A downgrade to junk would push about $120 billion of Oracle's bonds out of the investment-grade indexes, according to market reports. Those indexes are lists of safe-rated bonds that many investment funds are required to stick to. Those funds would then be forced to sell those bonds. Forced selling like that makes it more expensive for Oracle to borrow, exactly when Oracle needs to borrow the most. And a falling Oracle stock price brings Ellison's pledged-share chain back into play, too.

None of those steps has actually happened yet. But every single one of them is now a real, open door.

The key thing to remember: Every group in the chain is waiting on the one above it, and the weakest link right now is the power that is not switched on yet.

Oracle has real, strong numbers on its side, and they deserve a fair look. Two weeks before the force majeure letter, Oracle reported its latest quarter of results. Revenue, meaning total sales, was $19.3 billion, up 30% from a year earlier. Its cloud infrastructure business, the part that rents out computer power, grew 121% in that same year. Oracle signed more than $30 billion of new AI contracts in the quarter, raised its own forecast for the future, and said it had delivered 850 megawatts of new computing capacity. A megawatt is one-thousandth of a gigawatt, so that is about a third of the power Jupiter alone is supposed to use. Oracle said customer demand "continues to grow faster than supply." Net income, the profit left after every expense, was $4.7 billion, up 60% from the year before.

Oracle's leaders and partners back up that confident picture. Co-CEO Clay Magouyrk argued on the earnings call that any plan requiring "100% achievement of every one of their deliverables" is "a bad plan," which is exactly why a company builds in some slack ahead of time. Blue Owl said all the partners involved are "fully aligned." Bloom Energy, the fuel cell maker, said on social media that it remains committed and on schedule. After a flood reached the construction site on September 30, both Oracle and STACK said that no critical infrastructure had been damaged.

Outside analysts back up parts of that story too. William Blair, an investment firm, kept its buy rating on Oracle stock and told Reuters it saw little effect on this year's revenue. A Motley Fool writer argued on September 30 that Oracle's 8% bond yields are "an Oracle problem, not an AI problem," reasoning that bigger companies like Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon and Meta can simply pay for their own data centers out of their own cash, instead of borrowing. Even Filing Insights, the newsletter that first connected Oracle's stock sale timing to Ellison's plan and is generally skeptical, called the Jupiter delay a case of "supply struggling to come online on schedule, not demand collapsing."

That last point is fair, and worth sitting with. Plenty of people, maybe including you, want exactly what Oracle is building. But that strength actually sharpens the real question instead of erasing it. If demand for AI computing power is genuinely this strong, and Oracle still has to lean this heavily on borrowed money, nervous lenders, and one dominant customer, then the risk is not whether AI itself is useful. The risk is whether Oracle's money holds out long enough for the buildings to actually turn on.

The key thing to remember: Strong demand does not erase the risk; it just means the real question is whether the money lasts until the buildings turn on.

You may believe you have never bought a single share of Oracle stock on purpose. You probably own some anyway. Oracle is one of the companies in the S&P 500, a list of 500 of the biggest U.S. companies, so any S&P 500 index fund automatically holds a slice of Oracle. Many target-date retirement funds, the kind that adjust automatically as you age, also hold Oracle through the stock funds inside them. Oracle's bonds sit inside plenty of bond funds that specialize in buying investment-grade debt, meaning debt rated safe enough for conservative investors. If Oracle's rating were cut down to junk, the funds that are required to only hold safe-rated debt would have to sell, and a lot of those funds live inside ordinary 401(k) retirement plans.

There is another path too. Banks and private credit firms, which are lenders that operate outside the regular banking system, are the ones carrying the Jupiter construction loan. If a project like this one stumbles, those losses do not just disappear. They travel into the very funds and pensions that invested in private credit specifically to chase higher returns.

If you happen to live in New Mexico, this story is literally on your ballot. The property tax break, the water use, the air pollution permit, and a possible pause on new data centers are all live, contested questions in the November 3 election. Remember that the tax deal pays about $12 million a year, most of it to the county and some to schools, and that payment only keeps flowing if the project actually moves forward.

And even if none of that applies to you directly, if you simply use AI tools at all, know that the cost of building them is not only paid in dollars today. A large share of it is paid with borrowed money that still has to be paid back later, by companies like Oracle, whose stock is very likely already sitting somewhere inside your own savings.

The key thing to remember: Even if you never bought Oracle, your retirement savings probably hold a piece of it.

Mark these dates on a calendar if you want to follow how this story actually ends.

• November 3: This is the date New Mexico picks its next governor. A pause on new large data centers is on the table, depending on who wins.
• November 23: This is the state's deadline to decide on the fuel cell air-quality permit.
• Early December: This is the deadline for other agencies to decide on the pipeline's federal permits, based on Julien Simon's reading of the official filings.
• Around December: Oracle is expected to report its next quarterly results. Watch three things specifically: how big the cash gap is, how much new debt Oracle has taken on, and whether the $288 billion pile of unstarted leases has grown even larger.
• Any time, in Oracle's regular filings: watch for any new stock sale plan from Ellison, or any further change in how many shares he has pledged.
• February 1, 2027: This is the pipeline's current planned start date. If that date slips again, the three-year clock written into Oracle's force majeure letter starts to actually matter.

Oracle may turn out to be right that the letter was just routine paperwork. But paperwork like this is exactly how companies get ready for something they think could happen. For now, one of the biggest AI projects in the entire country is sitting and waiting on a pipe.

The key thing to remember: Watch the permits and the pipe; they decide whether Jupiter turns on, and that decides whether the stack of promises holds.