Oracle has sent a force majeure notice to the Blue Owl-owned developer of Project Jupiter, the 2.45GW data center campus in Doña Ana County, New Mexico. The notice keeps Oracle in place as anchor tenant. It reserves the right to defer payments if the campus fails to come online in 2028. Oracle still wants the capacity. It no longer wants to pay on a timetable that a water board, a land office and a state supreme court now control.
The timetable is already under pressure. The state land office blocked a natural gas pipeline across state land, and a fuel cell fallback was refused as well. On August 25 the New Mexico Supreme Court paused the air quality permit proceeding and the hearing officer recused himself. The roughly $18 billion of loans behind the project, arranged by a syndicate that includes Santander and Jefferies, have been quoted around 89 to 91 cents on the dollar. That’s a paper mark of about $1.8 billion on a campus whose gas turbines don’t yet have a permit to run.
The tenant just pushed the risk down the capital stack
In a build-to-suit data center the lease is the collateral. Lenders fund the developer because the tenant’s rent will service the debt, and the developer’s equity (here, Blue Owl’s) sits underneath to absorb overruns. Force majeure changes who waits. If a permit fight pushes the start date past 2028, the rent that was meant to begin servicing the loans doesn’t arrive, and the carrying cost of a half-built or finished-but-dark campus falls first on the equity and then on the lenders. Oracle holds its claim on 2.45GW. Blue Owl and the banks hold the interest bill.
This is the mechanism behind the worry about AI capex leaving hyperscaler balance sheets. The Brookings projection published this week puts US AI spending at $10.3 trillion between 2025 and 2032, about 3.6% of GDP a year. Railroads at their peak ran at 2.2%. The interstate highway program and the 1990s telecom build each ran near 1%. The researcher behind the estimate, Columbia’s Stijn Van Nieuwerburgh, likens the opacity of the special purpose vehicles financing it to the run-up to the subprime crisis. Jupiter is that structure with the lights on: an investment-grade name signs the lease, the SPV borrows against it, and when the schedule breaks the contract decides who pays.
The same work estimates 183GW of new data center capacity is needed over seven years, against 57GW installed today. Jupiter alone is about 1.3% of the requirement. The rest will meet its own pipeline route, aquifer and county commission. Each of those is now a clause someone will read closely.
Public equity is being asked to own the gap
On the same morning, Reuters reported from Firmus’s draft prospectus that the Australian operator expects a $77 million after-tax loss for the first half of fiscal 2027 as it prepares a $5 billion raise on the ASX. It would be Australia’s second-largest IPO, behind Telstra in 1997, with valuations floated as high as $60 billion. Firmus runs two data centers (Australia and Singapore) and has five more in development. Blackstone is a backer; Nvidia, Meta and OpenAI are customers. The bookbuild opens October 6 and listing is set for October 22.
A $60 billion valuation on a company losing money across two sites is a price for the five that don’t exist yet. Those are the same class of asset Oracle just told its landlord it won’t pay for on time if they’re late. IPO buyers would be taking delivery risk at the bottom of the stack, with no senior claim and no force majeure of their own.
The revenue side moved too, just not enough to matter at this scale. DeepSeek’s annualized run rate has reportedly reached $1 billion, up from under $500 million a few months ago, as it works to close a roughly $7.5 billion raise by late October. Doubling in a quarter is real growth. Against the Brookings arithmetic it barely registers: the build-out needs about $3.7 trillion of annual AI revenue by 2032 to earn its return, from something near $100 billion today at OpenAI and Anthropic combined. DeepSeek’s growth is also deflationary by design. Its pricing compresses what everyone else can charge per token, so fast growth at the cheapest supplier stretches the payback for owners of the most expensive capacity.
Qualcomm supplied the control case. Its licensing pact with Apple has been extended from April 2027. Apple sued, settled in April 2019, spent years building its own modem and is still renewing. That is what a durable technology cash flow looks like: a contract the customer tried to leave and couldn’t. A hyperscale data center lease was supposed to be the physical-world version of that. Jupiter shows it can be deferred.
Europe wants to supervise a build-out it isn’t buying
ASML’s European revenue share went from 5% in 2024 to 1% in 2025 to zero in the first half of 2026. “We are selling absolutely nothing in Europe,” said Frank Heemskerk, its head of public affairs. Intel’s €80 billion Magdeburg complex is gone. What ASML is asking Brussels for is telling: aggregate and guarantee purchases of European-made chips instead of subsidising more fab shells. That’s an offtake guarantee. In New Mexico a tenant is loosening one; in the Netherlands a supplier is asking a government to write one. The build-out runs on committed demand, and Europe has none to commit.
Yet Mark Carney, Emmanuel Macron and other Western leaders are pushing for a global supervisory regime for AI and a “technology stability” body. The name echoes the Financial Stability Board, which fits the Brookings warning about SPVs better than the leaders probably intend. They got an exhibit the same day, when OpenAI said its agents “took actions we did not intend” while trying to hack government and university websites. Private capital is already pricing that failure mode. Island, the enterprise browser security company, raised $400 million at a $6.4 billion valuation and plans to take headcount to 1,500. Washington, for its part, is adding cost at the labour end: TechNet has asked DHS to withdraw the proposed $103,265 fee on most new H-1B applications, a charge that lands on the same companies paying for the build.
The number to watch is the price of the Jupiter loans. If they hold near 90 through the air permit rehearing, lenders are treating the notice as a delay. If they fall, they’re treating it as a template, and every tenant with a lease on an unpermitted campus has just been shown the clause. Firmus’s October 6 bookbuild will show whether equity buyers read it.
