Oracle walked into a New Mexico county meeting on Tuesday with a guarantee that most utilities never receive: a customer offering to pay for electricity whether it uses it or not.
Under a proposed energy services agreement with El Paso Electric, the company said it expects to pay $10 million a year for 10 years, $100 million in total, even if its consumption comes in below the contracted amount. A second proposal would provide up to $55 million a year in direct credits for the utility’s residential and small-business customers in New Mexico for as many as three years, with the first benefits possibly arriving in 2027. Oracle also pledged $1 million toward flood recovery in the county.
The payments are meant to cover a share of electric system costs that would otherwise fall on other New Mexico customers, the company said, and the service would support late-stage construction, initial commissioning, emergency backup power and worker safety at the site.
The site is Project Jupiter, a four-building campus for artificial-intelligence computing in Santa Teresa, in Doña Ana County. Oracle projects that at full operations it will produce about $560 million in direct economic output a year in the county, and more than 3,100 jobs, including 1,500 tied directly to the project. The company’s updated analysis puts construction output at up to $2.2 billion and the project’s total economic impact in New Mexico above $13 billion across construction and the first 17 years of operation.
The presentation was supposed to be an update. Instead, commissioners learned about the utility agreement from an Oracle press release issued around the meeting, not from the slides prepared for them, and the questions started immediately. Julia Robin, an Oracle Cloud Infrastructure executive, announced the proposal early in the session.
Magesh Thiagarajan, an Oracle executive vice president, said the agreement was not final, which is why it did not appear in the materials given to the board. That explanation did not resolve the larger objection. Commissioner Olivia Schaljo-Hernandez and commission chair Manny Sanchez pointed to the $165 billion industrial revenue bond ordinance the board approved in September 2025, under which the project was authorized on the promise that the data center would power itself through a microgrid and battery storage while exploring renewable generation.
Tying the campus to the utility would require amending the agreements behind those bonds, which is the part commissioners were unwilling to wave through. If the county’s side of the bargain was a self-powered campus, an agreement that puts the project on the grid changes what the county thought it had bought. After the pushback, Mr. Thiagarajan said Oracle would not pursue the agreement without further discussion with the county, a retreat offered in the room rather than in a filing.
Oracle said its primary power arrangement is unchanged and that Bloom Energy fuel cells, chosen in April, remain the main source for the campus, pending air quality permits under review by the state Environment Department. The company is also moving natural gas to the site by truck to bridge delays in the pipeline that will eventually serve it, according to people familiar with the matter, a step first reported by Bloomberg.
El Paso Electric said it welcomes the opportunity to facilitate proposals that benefit its customers, and that no additional details were available. Oracle did not say how the credits would be distributed, who would qualify for them or what each household would receive.
Analysts said the credit proposal is the unusual part of the package. A single large customer paying to lower other customers’ bills is not a standard utility arrangement, and it would normally invite scrutiny from state regulators over how the money is collected and passed through. New Mexico’s Public Regulation Commission has not yet taken up the proposal, and the county has no authority over utility rates.
The backdrop is the power problem that AI construction has created across the country. Data centers are arriving faster than transmission lines and generation can be built, and the cost of upgrading a grid usually lands on the utility’s existing customers first, through rate cases that arrive years after the load does. That sequence has turned electricity into a political issue in states that courted the projects and are now explaining the bills.
Paying ahead of use is one answer a developer can offer. It converts a future rate increase into a present payment, gives the utility revenue certainty to justify system work, and puts a number on the promise that a data center will not make electricity more expensive for its neighbors. It also binds the developer to a utility for a decade, which is the part that drew objections from a board that had bargained for independence instead.
The county’s remaining hold on the project is procedural. Any amendment to the bond agreements requires another vote, and the same commissioners who questioned the proposal on Tuesday would have to approve it later. Oracle has said it will keep talking. What it has not said is whether the $100 million guarantee returns in a form that leaves the campus on its own generators, or whether the project’s power plan has quietly changed in a way the county would have to accept.
For the residents of Doña Ana County, the offer has a straightforward reading. A company that expects to be a very large electricity customer wants to be seen paying for the grid it uses. The argument that followed was about who gets to decide how, and whether a promise made to win tax breaks can be rewritten once the construction has started.
