Catenaa, Thursday, September 24, 2026- Oracle stock dropped on Thursday after the tech giant invoked force majeure on its massive data center being built in New Mexico.
Bloomberg News reported that Oracle sent the project’s developer, a unit of Blue Owl Capital, a notice citing force majeure.
The report said that Oracle is attempting to put off payments should the data center get derailed and fail to come online in 2028 as planned.
Oracle stock was down by over 7% in the morning session; the stock is down by over 31% so far this year.
Oracle is seeking to assert its contractual position if Project Jupiter(the data center) is delayed, but force majeure is invoked by companies to free themselves from contractual obligations.
“Project Jupiter remains on our planned schedule,” a spokesperson for Oracle told Bloomberg News, without commenting on the notice. “We are fully committed to New Mexico and confident in our path forward.”
The project has been the centerpiece of a massive AI infrastructure build-out unveiled last year by Oracle, OpenAI, and SoftBank.
The New Mexico campus is designed to handle 2.45 gigawatts of power, symbolic of the AI data center boom.
But the project has faced regulatory setbacks, including the denial of a key permit, amid growing public backlash over power demands and local impacts of massive data centers.
Sources told Bloomberg News that even if the force majeure notice is intended as a precautionary step to win some wiggle room, it risks alarming lenders backing the project. The debt tied to the development is already trading at stressed levels, below 90 cents on the dollar.
The reports that $18 billion was provided as a loan by 20 banks to fund the construction of the data center campus.
The notice by Oracle once again raises questions on data center leases, as contracts often include a clause allowing customers to back out if service doesn’t begin as scheduled.
According to Bloomberg, earlier this year, Google agreed to pay Elon Musk’s SpaceX for computing power through mid-2029, for example, but reserved the right to terminate if it didn’t gain access by a certain date.
According to a recent client alert from Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan, force majeure provisions are relatively common in the energy and commodities world when events such as bad weather and geopolitical conflicts disrupt supplies, leaving companies unable to fulfill their contracts. The clauses are becoming more common in data center developments as well.
