Oracle tries to appease Stargate data center opponents with renewables push
Ars Technica Jeremy Hsu
Oracle wants 2 GW of New Mexico renewables while building a giant OpenAI data center there. But the site will still run on natural-gas fuel cells, so the green pitch may not calm critics.
Based on reporting by Ars Technica, Jeremy Hsu — read the original for the full story.
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Oracle is trying to soften the blow around Project Jupiter with a big renewable-energy offer. On September 8, the company asked for proposals tied to 2 gigawatts of renewable projects in New Mexico, just as opposition to the data center it is building for OpenAI could slow the whole plan down.
Project Jupiter is the $165 billion data center planned for Santa Teresa, New Mexico, and it sits inside the larger Stargate AI infrastructure effort announced by President Donald Trump in 2025. That is the scale here: a huge buildout, a politically visible one, and one already running into local pushback.
The problem for Oracle is that the criticism is not only about where the power might come from someday. The data center itself is set to be powered by fuel cells that burn natural gas. So while the renewable proposal sounds impressive on paper, it does not change the immediate energy setup for the site.
That disconnect is exactly what local opponents have been pointing at through protests and court fights over environmental concerns. Michael Thomas, CEO of the Cleanview data platform, put it bluntly on LinkedIn: the 2 GW renewables plan would be synthetic, not a direct power source for the data center.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
This is the usual data-center trick: announce clean power far away, keep the dirty kit right next to the servers, and hope the headline does the heavy lifting. Anyone selling “renewables” while locking in natural gas should expect people to notice the plumbing. The AI boom keeps discovering that physics is a terrible PR department.
Read more about this at: Ars Technica