Oracle invokes force majeure to defer payments on its New Mexico data center Project Jupiter

Oracle's credit rating is BBB-, a single step above junk, which feels about right given the company's history.

That's still too high if you ask me.

Force majeure is honestly the perfect phrase for their incompetence.

Oracle borrowed the most money with the least credibility of any of these players, so if the market cracks, weakness shows up there first. I figure it works its way up from here.

It'll be interesting to see what excuses the big AI spenders invent to stop investing without admitting it. The first one is already on the table: AI will kill everyone so we should proceed slowly.

I always read the 'this is too dangerous, make us slow down' line as hype to attract more funding and customers. 'We don't have the money to build out' is the alternate reading that actually interests me.

The number of data centers that are supposedly coming online doesn't add up to me. It looks suspicious.

Look at demand though: our spot instances disappear and never come back, which says capacity is short. This is year 6 of a long automation shift, and there are far more applications than data centers that will actually get built.

Agree the capital dollar figures look way too high, and that's normal for a big buildout phase. It hurts the builders' profits but helps consumers in the end.

Reuters carries a short non-paywalled version with a bit more detail at reuters.com.

Nobody seems to read this as an ordinary cost problem. Materials and labor are getting more expensive precisely because everyone is building data centers at once.

Sure, but that still feeds through to the financials. If revenue projections aren't rising as fast as costs, the math stops working, which is exactly what a deflating bubble looks like.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't force majeure mean events outside your control? Permits and gas pipelines aren't exactly earthquakes.

Force majeure gets defined inside the contract, so if the clause covers changes in law or failure to get permits, the notice is valid. You cannot judge it without the actual contract text and New Mexico case law.

This should go over nicely with the holders of Oracle's roughly $100B+ in debt.

Counterpoint: if the payments get deferred and they simply don't spend the cash, repayment gets easier. Still, credit default swaps on Oracle cost about 4x a generic North American investment-grade issuer, and that gap opened up almost entirely in 2026.

I had no idea solid-oxide fuel cells were a real option at this scale. Oracle contracted Bloom for 1.8GW and expanded it to 2.8GW in April, and Project Jupiter would have been the largest SOFC installation by a wide margin.

Bloom has been gimmicky the whole time, in my opinion.

I genuinely don't get who keeps buying Oracle outside of Java shops. They chase you with license audits and fines until you standardize on their database, which really does feel like a ransomware business model.

Enterprise inertia explains it. People use whatever the organization already bought, and once processes are knitted to quirky Oracle SQL features, unwinding them is a nightmare.