Oracle seeks 2 GW renewables for New Mexico data center amid gas reliance

September 11, 2026 at 11:22 PM1 min

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Oracle announced on September 8 a request for proposals for 2 gigawatts of renewable energy projects in New Mexico. The move comes as the company's $165 billion Project Jupiter data center for OpenAI faces local opposition over its environmental impact. The data center will still be powered by natural gas fuel cells.

Key Facts

Oracle's request for proposals seeks 2 gigawatts of renewable energy projects in New Mexico.
The $165 billion Project Jupiter data center in Santa Teresa, New Mexico, is being built for OpenAI as part of the Stargate AI infrastructure project.
The data center will be powered by 2.45 gigawatts of fuel cells that consume natural gas.
New Mexico's Land Office twice blocked requests to run a natural gas pipeline to the data center in Doña Ana County.

Renewables Request

Oracle announced on September 8 a request for proposals for 2 gigawatts of renewable energy projects in New Mexico. The announcement comes as local opposition could delay development of the Project Jupiter data center that Oracle is building for OpenAI. Michael Thomas, CEO of the Cleanview data platform, wrote in a LinkedIn post that the renewables program would be synthetic and would not directly power the data center.

Gas Reliance

Oracle and OpenAI 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. Thomas pointed out that this would have effectively wiped out 20 years of carbon emissions reductions in New Mexico. The Project Jupiter plan pivoted from gas turbines to fuel-cell technology, which produces electricity through an electrochemical process without combustion. Julia Robin, VP of networking and data capacity management at Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, said the deployment of 2.45 gigawatts of fuel cells could reduce nitrogen oxide emissions by more than 90 percent.