Doña Ana County’s Project Jupiter joins $500 billion Stargate initiative led by OpenAI, Oracle

A Doña Ana County data center campus has been named one of five sites in the $500 billion Stargate Project, a sweeping initiative led by Oracle, OpenAI and other U.S. tech companies looking to build some of the nation’s largest artificial intelligence infrastructure.

The data center project in the Santa Teresa area of southern New Mexico, known as Project Jupiter, just last week gained approval from county commissioners for an unprecedented $165 billion industrial revenue bond to help finance the mammoth AI-training data center, which officials say will bring hundreds of permanent jobs to the region.

The announcement comes as the race for global AI dominance continues to attract massive investment and as the U.S. finds itself competing with other countries like China.

Officials on Tuesday said the Doña Ana County data center — being developed by BorderPlex Digital Assets and Stack Infrastructure — will be leased by Oracle Cloud Infrastructure for 18 years, with OpenAI serving as the facility’s primary client. OpenAI is the developer of the popular chatbot, ChatGPT, which boasts some 700 million weekly users.

“Those countries that are able to harness their national and natural resources to build out the infrastructure ... are going to be the countries that have a real advantage from an economic competitiveness perspective and certainly from a national security, geopolitical perspective,” Chris Lehane, OpenAI chief global affairs officer, told the Journal.

The Doña Ana County site, estimated to be operational by the end of 2026, will join the Stargate Project’s flagship site in Abilene, Texas, officials said. Other Stargate sites include projects in Shackelford and Milam counties in Texas, Lordstown, Ohio, and an undisclosed area in the Midwest.

Those projects ultimately put Stargate on track to complete the 10 gigawatts and $500 billion announcement made in January by President Donald Trump and tech executives.

The race to rapidly develop data centers to support AI has not slowed down. On top of the Stargate announcement, Nvidia Corp. said on Monday it plans to invest $100 billion in OpenAI for an additional 10 gigawatts of data centers. The first gigawatt of Nvidia systems will be deployed in the second half of 2026, officials said.

Project Jupiter will consist of four buildings on 1,400 acres and is projected to create an annual $384.2 million economic impact for the county, according to an Oracle fact sheet.

Keith Heyde, OpenAI director of physical infrastructure, told the Journal that New Mexico has been on its “radar” since the Stargate Project was announced.

“The site itself is a site that we’ve known about and been excited about,” Heyde said. “To see it turn from an idea into reality — a reality that is a key building block in enabling OpenAI and our path to moving the ball forward on artificial intelligence — is really exciting.”

The public first learned of the project in February, when Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham and BorderPlex Digital Assets Chairman Lanham Napier jointly announced plans for a “digital infrastructure campus” in Santa Teresa to include data center facilities.

In August, the Texas-based developer applied to Doña Ana County for a historically high $165 billion industrial revenue bond to finance the project, dubbed Project Jupiter. Although details of the application, including a prospective tenant for the facility, were concealed from the public as trade secrets and county officials had signed nondisclosure agreements, the scope of the project was revealed as a 1,400-acre campus comprising four data centers, business offices and a power generation and storage facility.

The $165 billion figure represents the maximum investment developers of the project would require for the center, promising around 2,500 construction jobs over a decade, in addition to 750 permanent staff positions with salaries in the range of $75,000 to $100,000.

But Project Jupiter has been met with local opposition and mistrust from the start.

The Sunland Park City Council passed a resolution asking commissioners to postpone a vote on the tax incentives on which the project depended, saying the city had not been consulted or given enough information to assess its impact on residents. Instead, commissioners approved the IRB at a Sept. 19 hearing.

The prospect of a hyperscale data center in Santa Teresa touched a nerve in a community where farmers have seen plunging water resources and communities have contended with failing systems for distributing clean drinking water.

BorderPlex Digital Assets and its partner, Colorado-based Stack Infrastructure, emphasized they would design a closed-loop cooling system for the data centers and suggested the facility would only require domestic water use appropriate for office personnel, as low as 20,000 gallons daily. Yet they offered scarce detail on how much water would be consumed by a natural gas turbine system, which requires steam, that would power the complex for a period of time.

Consultants representing the developer at town halls this month said the center’s microgrid would meet statutory net-zero emission targets by 2045, yet acknowledged that it would consume fossil fuels for some of the project’s 30-year service life.

Although a memorandum of understanding the governor signed in February includes language permitting nuclear energy to be used, BorderPlex Digital Assets consultant Jennifer Bradfute said “there are no plans” to use nuclear power, which is also water-intensive.

State officials have made a push in recent months to brand New Mexico as a tech hub, deploying millions of dollars toward quantum computing and schmoozing with some of the largest tech giants in the country. Economic Development Secretary Rob Black told a legislative committee in January that “a dozen companies” were looking to data centers in the state, suggesting that such projects could “really uplift our rural communities.”

Those efforts seem to be paying off.

“AI can only fulfill its promise if we build the compute to power it. That compute is the key to ensuring everyone can benefit from AI and to unlocking future breakthroughs,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in a statement. “We’re already making historic progress toward that goal through Stargate and moving quickly not just to meet its initial commitment, but to lay the foundation for what comes next.”