The deal
On September 19, 2025, the Doña Ana County Board of Commissioners voted 4 to 1 to approve Project Jupiter -- the largest data center project ever announced. The deal: $165 billion in committed investment over 30 years, $50 billion minimum in the first five years, 1,400 acres of land near the Santa Teresa Port of Entry in southern Doña Ana County.
The developer chain is layered. The named applicant is BorderPlex Digital Assets, an Austin-based holding entity. The development partner is Colorado-based Stack Infrastructure. The operator is Oracle. The tenant -- the actual customer who will use the compute -- is OpenAI, which folded Project Jupiter into its $500 billion Stargate AI infrastructure initiative after the county approval. At the time of the September vote, Oracle was described in the meeting record as "the most likely tenant" -- a careful phrasing that let the deal close before the Stargate connection was publicly confirmed.
The financial structure is an Industrial Revenue Bond arrangement. The developer transfers the land and equipment to the county; the county then leases it back to the developer for 30 years. While the lease is in effect, the property is technically county-owned, which means no property taxes are owed. After 30 years, the developer's shareholders gain ownership outright. In return, the county receives $360 million over 30 years — $12 million a year, roughly the cost of one mid-sized capital project. Sunland Park, the small city closest to the site, was allocated $10 million pending its own approval. Stack Infrastructure committed an additional $50 million for water and wastewater infrastructure upgrades.
Projected employment: 2,500 construction jobs through 2028, then 750 permanent operations jobs (Oracle has since doubled the permanent figure publicly). The vote was 4-1 -- District 4 Commissioner Susanna Chaparro was the lone dissenter.
The site is in Santa Teresa, a small unincorporated community where the population is roughly equivalent to the number of permanent jobs the project promises, and which already faces one of the harder drinking-water situations in the state.
The 20,000-vs-1,000,000 problem
At the September approval, the publicly disclosed water-use figures were modest by data-center standards. The lease agreement specified an average of 20,000 gallons per day for the data center campus, capped at a 60,000-gallon daily peak. An additional 20,000 gallons per day was attributed to power generation (a figure residents disputed even at the time). Construction was budgeted at 10 million gallons total over two years for initial fill-up, then 7.2 million annually for ongoing makeup water. All of these figures referred specifically to potable water from the local utility.
The specificity of that word -- "potable" -- becomes important. In late 2025, after the September approval, the legal agreement was finalized. According to reporting by Heath Haussamen in April 2026, the finalized lease added the word "potable" to the water-use caps. This made the contractual ceiling apply only to potable water, leaving non-potable water sources unbounded.
Then in February 2026, the New Mexico Office of the State Engineer (OSE) -- the agency that administers water rights statewide -- received a filing from the developer indicating the project planned to use approximately 1 million gallons of water per day across all sources combined. That figure works out to roughly 1,100 acre-feet per year. It is approximately 50 times the public-record 20,000-gallon daily cap. It is approximately 38 percent of the entire current daily production of Camino Real Regional Utility Authority, the public utility that serves Santa Teresa and Sunland Park (CRRUA's average daily output is 2.6 million gallons).
The OSE figure became public on April 7, 2026 in Haussamen's reporting. Oracle followed two days later with a statement confirming the project plans to use non-potable water sourced from a nearby sod farm for microgrid cooling. The non-potable source: a sod farm operated by Santa Teresa Capital -- a commercial agricultural operation tied to the same investor group involved in the project's broader development. The developer's framing: "reallocating existing water usage, not increasing demand."
The political reaction was sharp.
State Representative Micaela Lara Cadena (D-Mesilla): *"The more we learn, the more we realize these deals were made with dishonesty."*
State Senator Jeff Steinborn: the project shows *"a constantly moving target and a concealment."*
Commissioner Christopher Schaljo-Hernandez, in response to the OSE filing: *"My prior commitments still stand. We will be holding them accountable"* to the 20,000-gallon daily pledge.
Commission Chair Manuel Sanchez, more equivocally: *"It seems like it's a moving target and we're not being told what the real information is."*
Representative Sarah Silva -- who had previously supported the project -- said the OSE claim "shocked" her.
Norm Gaume of NM Water Advocates: allowing such usage *"just seems crazy."*
The water-disclosure pattern is not unique to Project Jupiter. The QTS Fayetteville Georgia campus drained nearly 30 million gallons of water through two industrial-scale hookups that were unbilled or unknown to the county utility -- discovered only when residents of a nearby subdivision noticed low water pressure. The pattern is the same: a hyperscale data center, a small utility, a single-word contractual loophole or unmetered hookup, and a discrepancy that surfaces years after approval. In Fayette County, GA, it was discovered after 30 million gallons had already left the system. In Doña Ana County, NM, it was discovered six months after approval and before construction has fully begun -- which means there is still time for the political process to do something about it.
Drought, arsenic, and one utility for two crises
The site context makes the water question urgent rather than abstract.
Doña Ana County is in moderate-to-severe drought. The Rio Grande, the surface-water lifeline of southern New Mexico, has been at historic lows for most of the last decade. The Mesilla Bolson aquifer that underlies the Santa Teresa area is the only major alternative source, and its recharge rate is a small fraction of the demand already on it.
The public utility serving Santa Teresa and Sunland Park -- Camino Real Regional Utility Authority -- recently settled with the New Mexico Environment Department over arsenic violations in its drinking-water supply. Arsenic at concentrations above the federal action level was detected at multiple connection points; the settlement requires CRRUA to install treatment infrastructure and submit to compliance monitoring. The settlement coverage was the subject of an April 2026 Source NM brief: residents of Santa Teresa and Sunland Park were drinking water that exceeded federal safety thresholds while their county was finalizing a contract to add 1 million gallons of new daily industrial demand to the same regional water system.
The initial opposition at the September 2025 commissioner vote already named these constraints. Sunland Park resident Jesus Baquera and Las Cruces resident Allen Downs spoke against the project, citing the arsenic situation and the regional drought. Their testimony was on the record before the lease agreement was finalized and before the "potable" loophole was inserted. The community concern was already documented; the legal mechanism quietly walked around it.
Norm Gaume of New Mexico Water Advocates is one of the more credentialed water-policy voices in the state. His public response to the OSE filing -- *"just seems crazy"* -- is the polite version of what is becoming clear from the underlying record: a 1,400-acre industrial development with daily water demand equivalent to a small city is being authorized in a county whose water utility cannot reliably deliver safe drinking water to its existing residents, with the cost of the development's infrastructure landing on a public agency (CRRUA) that has just settled a federal Safe Drinking Water Act case.
The Bloom Energy pivot — and what it actually fixes
On April 27, 2026 -- about three weeks after the OSE disclosure went public -- Oracle, BorderPlex Digital Assets, and Bloom Energy issued a joint press release announcing a major change to the project's power plan. Project Jupiter would no longer be powered by natural-gas turbines as originally proposed. The new design: up to 2.45 GW of Bloom Energy solid-oxide fuel cells, operating as a behind-the-meter microgrid.
The accompanying claims were aggressive. Bloom Energy fuel cells, compared to gas turbines, produce 92% less NOx and require a negligible amount of water in normal operation (Bloom fuel cells reject heat through air-cooled exchangers rather than wet cooling towers, which is the major water-use channel in conventional power generation). The combined message: switching to fuel cells materially reduces both the emissions and the water footprint of the campus.
The announcement is real and the technology is real. Bloom Energy's solid-oxide fuel cells are well-established commercial products; 2.45 GW is a meaningful order even at Bloom's scale; and the air-cooled rejection of waste heat genuinely does reduce water use compared to wet cooling.
What the announcement does NOT do:
1. It does not change the lease agreement. The "potable" loophole and the unbounded non-potable supply remain on the books.
2. It does not eliminate the construction-phase water demand. The 10 million gallons over two years for initial fill is still in the public record.
3. It does not address the data-center cooling itself. The 2.45 GW figure refers to power generation; the data-center buildings themselves still require cooling, and the cooling-water assumptions have not been re-disclosed since the fuel cell pivot.
4. It does not, on its own, reduce the State Engineer's recorded 1 million gpd figure. That figure was for total water use across all sources -- including but not limited to power generation. The reduction from fuel cells only applies to the generation side.
The Kairos Fellowship's "Big Tech's False Solutions to the Climate Crisis" primer makes a useful framing point that applies here: the AI buildout produces a problem (extraordinary new demand on power and water), then proposes a technology fix (fuel cells, nuclear SMRs, carbon capture, ocean cooling) that addresses the problem only partially while serving as the political case for proceeding with the buildout itself. The Bloom Energy pivot at Project Jupiter is, in operational terms, a real environmental improvement on the original gas-turbine plan. It is also, in political terms, a way to keep the project moving forward in the face of an active water-disclosure scandal -- by offering a new technology framing for a project whose underlying legal vulnerabilities have not been resolved.
What to watch
Five things ahead.
1. Whether the Doña Ana County Commission renegotiates or sues. The April 2026 reporting laid out two possible legal paths. Renegotiate the lease with all five commissioners to close the "potable" loophole -- which requires unanimous willingness to revisit a deal that is largely in force. Or sue to void the 30-year property tax exemption on grounds that the developer violated the spirit of the original agreement -- a higher-stakes legal lever that risks losing the modest 20,000-gallon potable cap that does exist on paper. Chair Manuel Sanchez has signaled openness to renegotiation; whether the other three pro-Jupiter commissioners will reopen the deal is the central political question.
2. State-level legislative response. Rep. Cadena, Sen. Steinborn, and Rep. Silva have all publicly criticized the disclosure. The New Mexico Water and Natural Resources Committee held a hearing on data-center water/energy impacts in Artesia on October 31, 2025 -- before the OSE figure was public. A follow-up hearing focused specifically on Project Jupiter and the OSE-vs-lease discrepancy would put state-level pressure on the disclosure regime that allowed this gap to form. Cadena and Steinborn together have the standing to call one.
3. NM State Engineer enforcement. Hydrologic reality eventually constrains rhetoric. The OSE has authority over water rights allocations in the state; if Project Jupiter requires water beyond what is contractually available or hydrologically sustainable, the OSE has the structural authority to refuse the permit. Tanya Trujillo, the deputy state engineer, is one of the more technically informed officials in this conversation.
4. Stargate JV dynamics. Project Jupiter is part of OpenAI's $500 billion Stargate initiative, which now also includes Stargate Lordstown (OH) (covered in our coal-proximity story) and the controversial Saline Township, Michigan Stargate campus that was forced through despite a 4-1 township denial. The Stargate sites are not always disclosed as Stargate sites at the time of local approval -- Saline was approved before the OpenAI connection was confirmed; Jupiter was approved with Oracle as "most likely tenant" before the OpenAI/Stargate connection was publicly tied to it. The pattern is consistent: small jurisdictions approve large projects without knowing who the end customer is.
5. The Permian Basin and Doña Ana as the same phenomenon. Project Jupiter sits ~200 miles west of the Permian Basin behind-the-meter corridor -- the Chevron-Microsoft / Zenith Volts / New Era Energy cluster we covered yesterday. The technology, the regulatory escape routes, and the water/land scale of the projects are recognizably the same. Whether the broader Southwest desert becomes the dominant U.S. AI infrastructure region depends in part on what happens to projects like Jupiter when their disclosure problems surface. A meaningful enforcement action on Jupiter would signal that small jurisdictions retain leverage even after approval. A renegotiation that ratifies the new water reality would signal the opposite.
If you live in southern New Mexico, are involved in CRRUA's customer base, or have FOIA-able material on Project Jupiter (the IRB documents, the OSE filing itself, the 5-commissioner lease language post-amendment), please email george@poweredbywho.com. The corridor is forming faster than the press can cover it; the disclosure regimes are doing less than they appear to. The two facts compound.
This story also serves as a backstory to the communities-fighting-back pattern we have been documenting. The Cassville WI story is a positive contrast: a community that voted 44-0 to ban data centers BEFORE one arrived, when the developer would not name itself. Project Jupiter is the cautionary contrast: a community that approved a deal under one set of disclosures and then learned the actual scale was 50 times larger.