Oracle’s Project Jupiter in New Mexico reportedly mothballed as $18B loan trades at steep discount

Oracle’s flagship AI data center project in southern New Mexico, known as Project Jupiter, is reportedly being mothballed as financial pressures mount around one of the largest infrastructure bets in the hyperscale computing race.

The 1,400-acre campus in Doña Ana County, developed by Stack Infrastructure and BorderPlex Digital Assets to serve Oracle Cloud Infrastructure’s AI workloads, had been positioned as a cornerstone of the broader Stargate initiative tied to OpenAI. Now the project’s $18 billion syndicated loan is trading at 89-91 cents on the dollar, a discount that signals serious investor unease about whether this thing actually gets built.

A project 26% finished with 100% of the problems

Construction on Project Jupiter kicked off in September 2025, and by early September 2026 the site had reached roughly 26% completion. Thousands of construction workers were on-site, and the project had already generated nearly $80 million in tax revenue for New Mexico by late July 2026.

The campus was designed to house four data center buildings powered by a behind-the-meter microgrid featuring Bloom Energy’s solid-oxide fuel cells, capable of delivering up to 2.45 GW of capacity. That energy setup replaced earlier plans for gas turbines after local pushback over emissions and water consumption. The fuel cell approach promised a roughly 92% reduction in NOx emissions compared to the original design.

But cleaner power plans haven’t been enough to keep the project’s financials healthy. Oracle’s credit rating was downgraded to BBB- in July 2026, just one notch above junk status. That downgrade sent the project’s massive loan facility sliding to a discount, with secondary market prices hovering around 89 to 91 cents on the dollar.

For context, a loan trading at 91 cents means investors are pricing in meaningful risk that they won’t get their full principal back. On an $18 billion facility, that discount represents somewhere in the neighborhood of $1.6 to $2 billion in implied losses that the market is already penciling in.

Legal battles and local opposition

Project Jupiter hasn’t just been fighting gravity in the credit markets. Environmental groups in New Mexico mounted sustained opposition to the development, challenging permits and dragging the project through regulatory bottlenecks that slowed construction timelines.

The legal saga reached a turning point on September 17, 2026, when the New Mexico Supreme Court lifted key stays on the project’s permits, allowing construction to formally proceed.

What Stargate loses if Jupiter goes dark

Project Jupiter was never just about Oracle. The facility was designed to handle AI workloads for OpenAI as part of the broader Stargate infrastructure buildout, the multi-hundred-billion-dollar initiative to create domestic AI computing capacity at unprecedented scale.

The campus was expected to create around 1,500 permanent operational jobs on top of the construction employment, and local officials had been counting on hundreds of millions in economic benefits for the region.

Oracle and its partners have maintained publicly that Project Jupiter remains on track, pointing to community investment plans, renewables procurement efforts, and the Supreme Court permit victory as evidence of forward progress.

Disclosure: This article was edited by Editorial Team. For more information on how we create and review content, see our Editorial Policy.