Oracle has kept its Salt Lake City data center running for more than a year by trucking in compressed natural gas while a permanent pipeline connection sits pending, according to a Bloomberg report. The company has extended the same workaround to a second site and is weighing it for a third.

Per Bloomberg's coverage, Oracle also used truck deliveries at its under-construction Shackelford County, Texas campus, a project it's developing with OpenAI. The cloud provider is now weighing the same model for Project Jupiter, its stalled New Mexico campus.

Why is Oracle resorting to trucks?

The Salt Lake City site has run on compressed natural gas deliveries since at least 2024, sources told the outlet. A permanent pipeline tap remains pending. The Texas campus, built jointly with OpenAI, has also used trucked fuel during construction. The pattern points to a broader problem: Oracle keeps building where grid and pipeline infrastructure can't keep pace.

Oracle's New Mexico facility — Project Jupiter — sits at the center of a regulatory fight. The New Mexico State Land Office rejected midstream operator Energy Transfer's application for a 17-mile extension, dubbed the Green Chile Project, in July.

What's blocking the New Mexico pipeline?

State officials flagged three concerns in their rejection: large-scale water use, higher CO2 emissions, and a lack of state revenue from the build-out. Each concern maps directly to a data center trade-off regulators have grown less willing to accept.

The pipeline was sized to move up to 400 million cubic feet of natural gas per day. That volume would feed 2.5 GW of Bloom Energy fuel cells on site — generating capacity roughly equivalent to two large nuclear reactors running flat out. At full output, that's enough electricity to power around 2 million U.S. households.

Oracle said at the time that Project Jupiter remained on schedule.

Can the campus still hit 2028?

Project Jupiter is supposed to come online in 2028. In September, Oracle sent a "force majeure" notice to Blue Owl Capital, a financing partner on the project. The notice signals Oracle wants to delay payments tied to the site rather than surrender its lease.

Force majeure clauses typically cover events outside a tenant's control. Oracle's invocation points to regulatory friction, not execution problems, as the main slip risk. The 2.5 GW target would require continuous fuel delivery at industrial scale — a hard lift for trucked gas alone.

What does the trucking pivot mean?

Trucked compressed natural gas buys Oracle months, not years. Diesel-style fuel logistics don't scale cleanly to multi-gigawatt campuses, and they invite the same emissions scrutiny that just killed the New Mexico pipeline. Oracle's willingness to lean on the workaround across multiple sites suggests the company expects gas-pipeline bottlenecks to persist in regulated Western states.

For OpenAI, which has staked compute capacity on the Shackelford County build, Oracle's New Mexico setback raises questions about backup plans if Project Jupiter slips past 2028. The force majeure notice also hints at how Oracle plans to manage that risk on the financing side.