Executives from Project Jupiter developers Oracle and STACK Infrastructure hosted area media for a tour of the construction site in Santa Teresa on Oct. 13.
The 1,400-acre campus will consist of four data center buildings powered by its own microgrid. The campus located in the Santa Teresa Industrial Park is over 30% complete, according to developers, but still faces regulatory challenges such as how to fuel the Bloom Energy fuel cells, as well as a pending air quality permitapplication.
The tour consisted of three stops throughout the construction site, including one of the four data center buildings situated near a cooling station.
Water usage remains among the top concerns regarding Project Jupiter and is among the factors leading state legislators
to consider a moratorium on new data centers during the 2027 legislative session.
Developers have touted its closed loop cooling system, which they said will reduce water usage after an initial fill of one million gallons of non-potable water from a private owner and subsequent 170,000 gallons annually of refill.
"Cooling is essential for any data center. It's important to remove the heat from the server floors and bring it outside of the data center building," said STACK Infrastructure Senior Vice President of Site Strategy Josh Timberlake.
"The project is not continuously consuming water for data center operations. Instead what happens, if you see the pipes on the outside of those buildings, that's part of the cooling loop that is filled up one time at the beginning of the project, and that fluid continuously cycles through it throughout the life of the project."
The tour concluded with a 30-minute question and answer session inside of 'Building A' with Oracle Executive Vice President Magesh Thiagarajan. Thiagarajan shared information about the project inside one of the network data halls in the data center, which will house rows of servers when operational.
"We wanted to do business in states where there is a tremendous amount of opportunity that we can create," Thiagarajan said. "I personally believe that the economic development we can create is going to change the course in New Mexico. We still believe that we are going to shape the course of the New Mexico economy over the next 10 to 12 years."
Earlier on Oct. 13, Thiagarajan presented an updateon the project for a third time to the Doña Ana County Board of County Commissioners. During his presentation, Thiagarajan said Oracle was waiting for a natural gas pipeline approval on an application with the Federal Energy Regulation Commission, but couldn't provide a date for an update.
Natural gas will power the Bloom Energy fuel cells, which will power the 110-acre microgrid on the northern end of the campus. Bloom Energy fuel cells have powered multiple data center projects, but nothing to the scale of Project Jupiter.
The first stop of the media tour showed six Bloom Energy fuel cells in an otherwise empty lot that will house stacks of fuel cells to form the microgrid. Thiagarajan said the microgrid will consist of approximately 7,000 fuel cells that will create 2.45 GW to power the data centers.
Although significantly cleaner than Project Jupiter's original plan to power the campus with gas turbines, fuel cells will still create an estimated 8.8 million tons of greenhouse gas emissions.
"When we selected this particular Bloom Energy cell, one of the fundamental criteria for us was to bring down both of the NOx emissions, the criteria pollutants the CO2 emissions and also we selected the technology because it actually was zero combustion technology," Thiagarajan said.
"We also wanted to stay off grid, which is one of the foundation requirements for the Doña Ana County Commission."
The tour also stopped at a staging area in the middle of the campus, where STACK Infrastructure Chief Operations Officer Mike Casey said 4,400 construction workers are working full time. Of those, 1,200 are New Mexicans and over 600 workers are from Doña Ana County.
"We project to have almost 7,000 construction workers so we continue to hire at a fast pace as the project continues to scale," Casey said.
Jason Groves covers local government and politics for the Sun-News. Reach him by email at jgroves@lcsun-news.com.
This article originally appeared on El Paso Times: Amid regulatory challenges, Project Jupiter site opens for a tour
