Oracle (ORCL: NYSE) sent a force majeure notice to Stack Infrastructure, the Blue Owl Capital (OWL: NYSE) unit developing Project Jupiter, Bloomberg reported on Sept. 24. The notice gives Oracle a contractual basis to defer payments if the campus in Doña Ana County, New Mexico, misses its 2028 opening. Oracle is staying on as the main tenant.

That is worse for the landlord than an exit in one respect. The lease stays in force, so the building cannot be marketed to anyone else, while the date rent begins is now open to argument.

The notice came as $18 billion of construction loans on the campus were quoted at 89 to 91 cents on the dollar and the banks holding them had been unable to sell them on.

Force majeure is the clause that excuses a party from an obligation when something outside its control prevents performance. Oracle is using it to protect the one date a data center lease runs on: commencement. Under take-or-pay the tenant owes nothing while a building is under construction and the full contracted rate once it is delivered. Moving that date moves the first rent check.

Oracle has not suspended payments and has not said the project is late.

“Project Jupiter remains on our planned schedule,” Oracle said. “We are fully committed to New Mexico and confident in our path forward.” The company also said it is “reimagining” the campus power plan.

“This notice does not change the financial commitments to this multi-year project,” Blue Owl said.

Both statements can be true on the day a notice is sent. What the notice does is put in writing, in advance, that any slip past 2028 belongs to someone else. Bloomberg reported that it is unclear whether the move would release Oracle from its obligations.

Oracle’s fiscal 2026 10-K disclosed $260 billion of lease commitments that had not commenced as of May 31, 2026, expected to begin between the first quarter of fiscal 2027 and fiscal 2029 for terms of 15 to 19 years. The filing does not break out Jupiter. If the campus’s lease sits in that figure, as its timing suggests, this is the first public sign Oracle is prepared to contest when one of those commitments begins.

Jupiter’s problem is fuel. The 1,400-acre site near Santa Teresa is designed to run on up to 2.45 gigawatts of Bloom Energy (BE: NYSE) fuel cells, and fuel cells need natural gas. 

Energy Transfer (ET: NYSE) started the approval process on Jan. 29, 2026. That day its Transwestern Pipeline subsidiary asked the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) to approve the “Green Chile Project” under its existing blanket certificate, docket CP26-80-000. The project is a 17.77-mile, 24-inch lateral in Doña Ana County that would deliver 400,000 dekatherms of gas a day to Green Chile Ventures LLC to generate electricity for the Project Jupiter campus, at an estimated cost of $60.2 million. New Mexico Land Commissioner Stephanie Garcia Richard, a Democrat currently running for Lieutenant Governor, denied rights-of-way across state trust land on March 20. 

Another setback hit three weeks later. On April 16, FERC staff filed a protest against the blanket-certificate request, which took the project off the automatic approval track and left it needing a Commission order. The Bureau of Land Management approved the pipeline in May under a 14-day emergency review. On July 14 Garcia Richard rejected Energy Transfer’s request to reconsider, saying the pipeline appeared to offer “very little benefit” to the trust, the community or the state. She cited greenhouse gas emissions and the strain on water and said the lease would bring “minimal revenue” to the trust.

FERC’s July 24 notice set the schedule for its environmental review and identified the source of the gas, a new “Green Chile El Paso Meter & Regulation Station” on the El Paso Natural Gas system mainline, owned by Kinder Morgan (KMI: NYSE). (Energy Transfer’s own Transwestern mainline is not the source.)

In a FERC filing in mid-August, Energy Transfer said the pipeline’s anticipated in-service date had moved from August 2026 to February 2027, Source New Mexico reported. February 2027 is Energy Transfer’s own target, and no regulator has endorsed it. Around the same time the New Mexico Supreme Court paused the air-permit proceedings for the campus power plant, the permit the gas is meant to feed. FERC issued its environmental assessment on Sept. 10, with public comments due Oct. 5. Public Citizen has intervened against the project. Several steps remain before February 2027. The Commission has to issue an order after Oct. 5, and that order can be challenged. Transwestern then has to build 17.8 miles of pipe. Even once gas is flowing, the campus cannot burn it until the paused air permit is resolved.

The Feb. 1 date leaves a year between first gas and a 2028 opening. A fuel-cell plant at this scale has to be installed, commissioned and running before the halls behind it can be energized and accepted. Any further slip in the pipeline comes out of that year.

The capacity has increased as well. The “Booked, Not Billed” section in Oracle’s SEC filings has carried the site at 2.2 gigawatts; but current reporting cites up to 2.45 gigawatts after the developers switched from gas turbines to fuel cells in May.

Construction debt on a leased data center is repaid from the tenant’s rent. Until rent starts the loan accrues interest and the developer keeps spending. If Oracle’s notice holds, every month Jupiter runs past 2028 is a month Stack and its lenders fund without the income the loan was sized against.

The lenders are already marked. A group of 20 banks provided $18 billion late last year to start construction. The loans are quoting at 89 to 91 cents by syndicate banks including Banco Santander (SAN: NYSE) and Jefferies (JEF: NYSE). That values the paper at $16.02 billion to $16.38 billion, a discount of $1.62 billion to $1.98 billion by our calculation from the reported range.

The failed distribution is the bigger problem. Banks arrange a loan this size to sell most of it to institutional investors. That effort stalled over concerns about Oracle’s financing needs and its credit rating, which S&P cut to BBB-minus on July 9. The banks hold more of Jupiter than they intended, and the quotes were set before the notice existed.

At an illustrative 7% all-in rate, which is our assumption and not a disclosed term, $18 billion carries $1.26 billion a year in interest. On that basis a one-year slip costs close to the discount the market has already applied.

The contested point is whether a permit denial counts as outside anyone’s control. The state’s first denial was public on March 20. A tenant claiming force majeure over a risk that had been on the record for six months invites a dispute, and Blue Owl’s statement reads like the opening position in one.

Blue Owl is the common thread. It is a party to the Abilene joint venture with Crusoe Energy, financed by a $7.1 billion loan led by JPMorgan (JPM: NYSE), and to the $27 billion Hyperion joint venture with Meta (META: Nasdaq) in Louisiana.

Non-technology precedents are helpful here. April 2020 Gap (GAP: NYSE) stopped paying rent on stores closed by the pandemic, and Simon Property Group (SPG: NYSE) sued it that June over the unpaid rent. Gap kept its leases and argued about when the rent was owed, which moved the timing problem onto the landlords and the holders of their mortgage debt.

The structure is the same here. A creditworthy tenant keeps its position and disputes the payment schedule, and the party carrying the debt waits.

The pandemic hit every tenant at once. Jupiter’s obstacle is a single state agency’s decision about a single project, made twice and in public. That is a harder force majeure case, and a dispute, if it comes, is more likely to turn on the lease language than on the event.

One notice on one campus is a contract dispute. A second notice at a different site, with a different developer and a different cause, would be a pattern. These are the places it would show first.

1. Jupiter itself. The Feb. 1, 2027 pipeline date and the air permit are the two conditions for a 2028 opening. A secondary price below the 89 to 91 cent range would mean lenders think the notice has teeth.

2. Abilene. Four of eight buildings were operating in April, according to Epoch AI satellite tracking, with the full 1.2 gigawatts targeted for the end of 2026 and the Oracle–OpenAI contract reported to begin billing in 2027. Blue Owl is in this joint venture too.

3. Shackelford County, Tx. Vantage’s “Frontier” campus carries a $22 billion loan led by JPMorgan and MUFG (MUFG: NYSE). The first building is targeted for the second half of 2026, making it the next Stargate delivery with its own disclosed debt.

4. Port Washington, Wis. Vantage’s 1.3-gigawatt site is due at the end of 2028, the same window as Jupiter.

5. Oracle’s filings. The $260 billion of pending leases moves onto the balance sheet as each lease commences. A commencement that slips shows up as lease liabilities growing more slowly than the 10-K schedule. New language about force majeure or disputed commencement dates in a 10-Q would put the issue in a filing for the first time.

The common input at every one of these sites is power. Jupiter’s delay came from a gas permit.

For Oracle the notice is inexpensive. It buys an argument Oracle can use if 2028 slips while keeping its place in a campus built for the OpenAI contract. 

We would argue that the only thing Oracle is known for more than its databases is the strength of its database contracts. And we suspect the same lawyers drafted their datacenter contracts. 

If Blue Owl didn’t know that before, they probably know it now. Their loans were underwritten on rent starting in 2028 from an investment-grade tenant. That tenant is now one notch above junk, the paper could not be sold down, and the tenant has put in writing that it may not pay on that date. 

Delays cost money and Oracle is refusing to hold that bag. 

But that doesn’t mean one site with an identifiable cause for delay stops the AI buildout, and both companies said, for now,  the schedule holds. A second notice at a campus with a different developer and a different obstacle could signal something else. Abilene and Shackelford County, both delivering buildings in the next several months, are where it would appear first. 

The finance bros will be watching.

Ahead of the Trump-Xi summit, NewsNation's Connell McShane asked me whether the two leaders could reach a deal on AI safety and whether China's state-directed approach carries less risk of models going rogue. The summit ended with an agreement to set up a channel for reporting AI incidents, with the next exchange due by November. There was no joint framework for regulating frontier models.

WATCH THE NEWSNATION HIT HERE →

Yahoo! Finance launched Market Hang, a new hour-long show with Turney Duff opened the first episode by asking the panel whether AI is going to kill us. When Nancy Tengler called the latest AI risk essay a narrative play ahead of an IPO, Cory Johnson disagreed. The discussion moved on to why China cannot close the chip gap, what total addressable market means when the customers are agents, Louisiana signing NDAs over data centers and the felony Johnson once found buried in an S-1.

WATCH THE NEW YAHOO! FINANCE MARKET HANG HERE→

Oracle sent a force majeure notice to Blue Owl over Project Jupiter, the 2.45-gigawatt Stargate campus in New Mexico estimated at $165 billion. The notice could let Oracle defer rent if the site misses its 2028 target. On Schwab Network's Market on Close, I suggested to Sam Vadas that the notice does not end Oracle's obligations as tenant. What it shows is that power and permitting now determine when AI backlog turns into revenue.

WATCH THE SCHWAB HIT HERE →

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