Oracle may truck gas to its $165B Stargate campus — at 100 MW, one trailer lasts about 40 minutes

Oracle is considering delivering compressed natural gas by truck to Project Jupiter, its Stargate data-center campus in New Mexico, so that early phases can run before the pipeline serving the site is finished, Bloomberg reported on 8 October. The gas was to come through Energy Transfer's pipeline, whose route across state trust land was rejected by New Mexico's land office; reports put the new completion date in early 2027 rather than this August. Oracle has used trucked gas before, keeping a campus near Salt Lake City moving for more than a year while it waited for a pipeline, and is trucking gas to a site in Texas. Analysts doubt trucks can carry the full load: Ellie Holbrook of SemiAnalysis estimated that at 100 MW of demand, each large compressed-gas trailer would be exhausted in about 40 minutes, against a planned campus of about 2.45 GW. East Daley Analytics put delivered gas at roughly four times the price at a major pipeline hub. Oracle sent the developer a force majeure notice in September over the same delay. The tracker's Stargate entry carries the update.

Why it matters

Two weeks ago the constraint at Jupiter was a sentence in a legal notice: a pipeline denied right-of-way across state land. This is what the same constraint looks like in operations. Forty minutes per trailer at 100 MW means dozens of truck deliveries a day to run a small fraction of the campus, at several times the normal price of the fuel, on rural roads, for months. It can work for the first phase — Oracle has shown it does — and it cannot work for the site as designed.

That is the useful way to read the AI buildout's power problem. The campuses are announced in gigawatts; the bridging solutions are measured in trailers. Every workaround that keeps an early phase on schedule — trucked gas, on-site turbines, temporary generators — buys months, costs a premium, and leaves the full-scale question exactly where it was: the permanent supply has to be permitted and built, and the people deciding that were not at the announcement.

What to watch

Whether the pipeline route is approved and the early-2027 date holds, how much of Jupiter's first phase runs on trucked gas, and whether the force majeure notice is revised now that a workaround exists.