by Joshua Bowling, Source New Mexico
August 24, 2026
The New Mexico Supreme Court late Sunday unanimously granted two requests to pause proceedings related to Project Jupiter, the Oracle and OpenAI data center campus under construction in Doña Ana County.
In two brief orders, Supreme Court justices temporarily halted a scheduled air quality permit hearing for Project Jupiter’s proposed natural gas-powered fuel cell system and ordered the Office of the State Engineer to pause its practice of allowing water from a specific well to be used for the data center’s construction.
The New Mexico Environment Department’s air quality permit hearing was previously scheduled to begin on Sept. 14 in Sunland Park. Opponents to the project, including local and national environmental groups, have argued that a September hearing leaves them too little time to prepare expert testimony.
In a petition to the state Supreme Court, the Santa Fe-based clean energy group New Energy Economy argued that such a hearing could be premature because the pipeline intended to feed the fuel cell system has not yet gained the necessary approval to be built. In fact, New Mexico Commissioner of Public Lands Stephanie Garcia Richard has twice shot down its developers request to build a portion of it on state trust land, and recent federal regulatory filings show it may not come online until early next year.
Mariel Nanasi, New Energy Economy’s executive director, told Source NM that she believed bad decisions plagued the NMED hearing process.
Monday, for instance, was supposed to be the deadline for involved parties to file written testimony — it was also the deadline for NMED to upload thousands of pages of relevant documents, which she said would not give attorneys like her the necessary time to assemble a strong case.
“Every single thing about this proceeding was uncharacteristically unusual…it was the cumulative effect of multiple bad rulings and all of them were meant to silence public participation,” she said.
The Supreme Court’s other Sunday night order focused on a request from national conservation group the Center for Biological Diversity. In a petition to the court, its environmental lawyers argued that water use on Project Jupiter’s construction site could violate state law.
Specifically, they argued that the Officer of the State Engineer wrongly approved the drilling of an emergency well, which has since supplied millions of gallons of water to the development. Attorneys argued that state law requires a public notice and a hearing in instances where a water source’s intended use is going to change.
“We’ve been saying all along that we need time to do this,” Colin Cox, a New Mexico-based Center for Biological Diversity attorney, told Source NM. “We need time and information, and the hearing officer has given us neither.”
A spokesperson for the Office of the State Engineer declined to comment when reached by Source NM.
The Supreme Court justices gave parties involved in the two cases until Sept. 2 to respond to their orders.
Source New Mexico is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Source New Mexico maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Julia Goldberg for questions: info@sourcenm.com.
