Bloom Energy shares slipped 3.10% on the session, according to market data. It looks like a footnote next to the day's bigger swings in oil and gold. It isn't. Bloom's fuel cells are supposed to power a sprawling data-center campus now under construction in the United States, and that campus just became the clearest evidence yet that the AI buildout's binding constraint is no longer chips or capital. It is electrons.
Oracle sent a force-majeure notice this week to a unit of Blue Owl Capital, the developer behind Project Jupiter, its flagship data-center campus in New Mexico, citing the risk that power for the site won't arrive on schedule, a person familiar with the matter told Reuters. Oracle shares fell 4% on the news. The filing does not let Oracle walk away — it can't terminate the lease under any circumstances — but it buys time on payments if the facility isn't operating by 2028 as planned. Securing power for the site was Oracle's contractual job in the first place.
The mechanics matter because they show who actually eats the risk. Blue Owl has roughly $3 billion in equity tied up in Project Jupiter, with Oracle on the hook for the debt costs regardless. During development, Blue Owl collects a 9% yield on its equity, rising to about 11% once the site is live — meaning the force-majeure clause mostly extends the cheaper development-stage rent rather than erasing Blue Owl's eventual return. Blue Owl said the notice "does not change the financial commitments to this multi-year project." The campus, spread across 1,400 acres and financed with $18 billion in bank loans, sits inside the broader $500 billion Stargate initiative that Oracle, OpenAI and SoftBank are building out.
What's actually holding it up is concrete and mundane: a natural-gas pipeline meant to feed the site's Bloom Energy fuel cells, originally due online last summer, has slipped to February on permitting delays, and a separate air-quality permit for the 2.45-gigawatt power system is still awaiting a decision from New Mexico regulators ahead of a Nov. 23 deadline. Oracle told CNBC "Project Jupiter remains on our planned schedule" and "We are fully committed to New Mexico and confident in our path forward." New Mexico residents, backed by environmental groups, have turned the project into a live issue ahead of the midterms, forcing Oracle into a public-outreach campaign it clearly didn't plan to need.
Layered on top is Oracle's own balance sheet. The company spent $28.5 billion on capital expenditures last quarter, up from $8.5 billion a year earlier, and posted negative free cash flow of $5 billion. KeyBanc's Jackson Ader put it bluntly: "Oracle is in the most tenuous of cash positions of all the major hyperscalers" and warned that "these types of issues might spread."
He may already be right. More than $170 billion in U.S. data-center capacity has been "blocked, withdrawn, or stalled" by community opposition since January 2024, according to energy advisory firm Relae, formerly Carbon Direct, as reported by Utility Dive. Goldman Sachs expects hyperscalers to spend roughly $581 billion on U.S. AI infrastructure this year and projects data-center power demand more than doubling from 2025 levels to reach 66 gigawatts by 2027, while cautioning that some of that capacity risks slipping behind schedule amid delays and cancellations. Texas has paused new interconnections entirely to audit a queue of 474 gigawatts against the grid's all-time peak demand record set this summer, prompting BloombergNEF to warn the pause could delay 20% of the U.S. data-center pipeline. Texas PUCT Chairman Thomas Gleeson isn't shy about why: "The projections are extremely high, and what we know is that a lot of that load will not actually come here. A lot of it is speculative." Former commissioner Karl Rábago is blunter still: "utilities are playing the tune that makes regulators dance — if you don't let us do this, the grid could collapse under all that load."
Regulators are pushing back on the contracts, too. FERC on Sept. 22 rejected Commonwealth Edison's "notice of cancellation" of a transmission agreement tied to a 1.8-gigawatt, $20 billion data center that PowerHouse Hillwood is developing in Joliet, Illinois — though the commission stopped short of ruling on the underlying dispute, leaving it to a federal district court to decide whether the developer's $1 letter of credit actually satisfied the deal's terms. Commissioner David LaCerte wasn't waiting for the court: he called it "an embarrassing legal fiction: insulting to the underlying ratepayers, stakeholders, and the grid itself that bear the real risk of this project," adding it was "less than the price of a cup of coffee." Commissioner David Rosner framed the stakes plainly: "cost-recovery agreements matter because they enable efficient and accurate planning, and ensure that project risks stay where they belong: with the developer, not the public."
Capital markets are already sorting winners from hopefuls. DayOne, backed by Coatue and Hillhouse, is pushing toward a public filing as soon as October and an IPO by November, Reuters reported, even as SoftBank-backed SB Energy postpones its own listing amid investor unease over its reliance on OpenAI as a customer. Shenton Research's Ke Yan drew the line investors are now drawing: "The dividing line is whether demand is contracted and already energized, or only planned," Moody's projects the six biggest U.S. tech companies will push AI capital spending toward $1 trillion by 2027 — money that increasingly buys land, chips and litigation, in roughly that order of certainty.
Project Jupiter was supposed to be a monument to how fast American AI infrastructure could rise. For now it's a monument to how slow the grid actually moves — and to how much of the industry's confidence was built on the assumption that it wouldn't matter.
