Oracle's proposed investment in 2 gigawatts of renewable energy projects for New Mexico comes as local opposition could delay development of the Project Jupiter data center that Oracle is building for Open AI. The two tech companies are developing the $165 billion Project Jupiter data center in Santa Teresa, New Mexico, as part of the broader Stargate AI infrastructure project announced by President Donald Trump in 2025.

But Project Jupiter faces local protests and court battles over concerns about its environmental impacts—and the latest Oracle announcement on September 8 seeking proposals for renewable energy projects does not change the fact that the data center will be powered by fuel cells that consume natural gas. "Like all matching programs, this would be synthetic in the sense that 2 GW of renewables wouldn't directly power the data center," wrote Michael Thomas, CEO of the Cleanview data platform.

Oracle and Open AI had originally planned to build 2.2 gigawatts of natural gas generation that could have resulted in 14 million tons of CO2 emissions per year. State residents and environmental groups have rallied in opposition to Project Jupiter with protests and lawsuits. New Mexico's Land Office twice blocked requests to run a natural gas pipeline to the data center in New Mexico's Doña Ana County.

Compared to the original plan for gas turbines, the deployment of 2.45 gigawatts of fuel cells could reduce nitrogen oxide emissions by more than 90 percent and "substantially" reduce the amount of other air pollutants, according to Julia Robin, VP of networking and data capacity management at Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.