Oracle obligated to pay data center investors despite power issues

Oracle tried to hit the emergency brake on one of the largest data center projects ever conceived. The brake didn’t work. On September 24, Oracle issued a force majeure notice to Blue Owl Capital’s Stack Infrastructure unit regarding Project Jupiter, the tech giant’s sprawling AI data center campus in southern New Mexico. Force majeure clauses are supposed to be the contractual equivalent of an act-of-God exemption, letting parties off the hook when circumstances beyond their control make performance impossible. Oracle invoked it over power infrastructure complications. But the fine print of its agreements tells a different story: Oracle remains contractually obligated to continue paying debt costs and cannot terminate the lease, regardless of whether the site ever gets plugged in. What happened at Project Jupiter Project Jupiter is not a modest undertaking. The campus spans roughly 1,400 acres and is designed to deliver approximately 2.45 gigawatts of power capacity when fully operational. The project is part of Oracle’s broader commitment exceeding $300 billion for AI infrastructure. The target was to begin operations in 2028. The force majeure notice signals that timeline is now...