The New Mexico Supreme Court handed down its ruling on what looked like a routine procedural matter, but for the engineers overseeing Oracle’s largest data center bet it was the news they had been waiting three weeks to hear. In a unanimous decision, the court rejected two legal challenges to the permits for Project Jupiter, Oracle’s sprawling AI data center campus in Doña Ana County, clearing the way for construction to resume and for air-quality permit hearings to move forward.
Mahesh Thiagarajan, a vice president in Oracle’s cloud infrastructure unit, had already given investors a progress report the same week. The project is 26 percent complete, he said, up 17 percentage points from the figure Oracle disclosed in July. The fuel-cell microgrid site that will eventually power part of the campus, however, is only about 10 percent built, and approvals for air and water quality and for a natural-gas pipeline remain behind schedule.
The court’s ruling removes two of the obstacles. With the challenges dismissed, the project can again draw water from wells in Santa Teresa after a pause of more than three weeks, and the air-quality permit process can resume. Stifel analysts, who reaffirmed their buy rating on Oracle’s stock, noted one remaining gap: the air-quality hearing still has no hearing officer and no set date.
Oracle has framed Project Jupiter as a cornerstone of its push to sell rented computing power to the companies racing to build and run artificial-intelligence models. The company has said the campus will generate more than $4.7 billion in economic benefits for the state, along with roughly 7,000 construction jobs and 1,500 permanent positions. In July it reported that the project had already delivered almost $80 million in state and county tax revenue.
The scale of the commitment reflects how fast Oracle’s cloud business has grown. In its fiscal 2027 first quarter, revenue and earnings per share both beat analyst expectations, driven by a cloud-infrastructure segment that continues to expand at a high clip. The market’s focus, Stifel and others said, has shifted to the pressure on profit margins as Oracle pours money into data centers ahead of the revenue they will eventually produce.
Project Jupiter has also become a showcase for how data center builders are trying to answer questions about electricity and water. In April, Oracle said it would work with BorderPlex and Bloom Energy to power part of the campus with fuel cells, a setup the companies described as cleaner and more water-efficient than conventional generation. Oracle has said the project will use, over fifteen years, roughly the same amount of water as about nine households, a claim aimed at a state where water is a politically sensitive resource.
The fuel-cell microgrid is the slowest piece of the build so far, at about 10 percent complete, and analysts said its timetable matters because it is central to Oracle’s argument that the campus can grow without adding to local grid strain. The gas-pipeline approval, still unresolved, is a related concern: the microgrid’s generators need a supply of natural gas that has yet to be fully permitted.
For New Mexico, the project sits at the center of a broader bet on data centers as an economic engine. The state has welcomed the investment and the tax revenue it brings, while regulators have kept a close eye on the permits that govern air, water and land use. The Supreme Court’s decision suggests the judiciary is not inclined to block the project, but it leaves the remaining approval steps firmly in the hands of state environmental officials, who have not yet set the air-quality hearing.
Stifel’s buy rating signals that the analysts see the legal clearing as one more sign the project is moving from planning toward concrete. The rating also carries a caveat embedded in the fine print: until the air-quality hearing is scheduled and the pipeline is approved, a portion of the campus’s timetable remains outside Oracle’s control.
Thiagarajan’s figures were the first hard numbers since July, and they gave investors a way to measure whether the project is on track. The jump from 9 percent to 26 percent over the summer suggests construction has accelerated, even as the permitting backlogs on fuel cells and gas lines have persisted. Oracle’s bet is that the two timelines, the concrete and the paperwork, will converge before the first customers arrive.
That convergence is what the company’s cloud ambitions depend on. Oracle has positioned itself as a landlord to the AI boom, signing large customers and committing to tens of billions of dollars in capital spending. Project Jupiter is one of the largest single pieces of that plan, and its progress is now read, quarter by quarter, as a gauge of whether Oracle can convert demand for AI computing into finished capacity on schedule.
For the moment, the court has done what courts do in such cases: it removed a legal cloud, not a regulatory one. The remaining decisions rest with state agencies that will schedule the air-quality hearing and rule on the pipeline. Oracle’s engineers, meanwhile, keep pouring concrete in Doña Ana County, waiting on the next round of permits the way they waited on this one.
