Oracle Trucks Compressed Natural Gas to Utah and Texas Data Centers Amid Pipeline Delays

Oracle has resorted to trucking compressed natural gas to keep its Salt Lake City data center operational, as the cloud computing giant waits for a long-delayed pipeline connection that is expected to provide permanent fuel supply. The workaround, which has been in place for more than a year, underscores the mounting infrastructure challenges facing hyperscale operators as they race to expand computing capacity across the United States.

According to Bloomberg, which cited unnamed sources, Oracle has also relied on truck-delivered gas for its under-construction campus in Shackelford County, Texas, a facility being developed in conjunction with OpenAI. The Texas site represents a significant piece of Oracle's strategy to support AI workloads, and the temporary fuel arrangement allows early-stage operations to proceed while pipeline infrastructure is finalized.

The company is now reportedly considering the same trucked-gas model for its stalled Project Jupiter data center in New Mexico, where regulators have blocked the extension of a natural gas pipeline that was intended to feed Bloom Energy fuel cells at the site. In July, the New Mexico State Land Office rejected midstream natural gas firm Energy Transfer's application to build the pipeline. The proposed 17-mile extension, known as the Green Chile Project, was designed to deliver up to 400 million cubic feet of natural gas per day to power 2.5GW of Bloom fuel cells deployed on site.

State officials cited large-scale water use, increased CO2 emissions, and a lack of state revenue generation as major factors behind the rejection. Despite the regulatory setback, Oracle maintained at the time that Project Jupiter remained on schedule. However, in September, the company sent a force majeure notice to Blue Owl Capital in an effort to shield itself from potential increased costs associated with the project. Should the 2.5GW campus fail to come online in 2028 as planned, Oracle is seeking to delay the payments it would owe rather than forfeit its tenancy, according to the report.

The reliance on trucked gas highlights a broader tension in the data center industry: while demand for AI and cloud computing capacity continues to surge, the energy infrastructure required to power these facilities often lags behind. For Oracle, the temporary measure buys time, but it also signals the growing complexity of securing reliable, large-scale power in a regulatory environment that is increasingly scrutinizing the environmental and fiscal impact of data center developments.