The Doña Ana County Board of Commissioners on Friday will decide whether to approve Project Jupiter, a proposed $165 billion data center campus that would be located near the port of entry in Santa Teresa, New Mexico.
The project – a collection of four data centers meant for artificial intelligence training – would be among the biggest private investments ever made and could reshape the regional economy around El Paso and Las Cruces.
But whether this region has the water supplies to support the data centers and the natural gas-fired generation source that would power the campus is a major concern residents of El Paso and southern Doña Ana County have consistently voiced since details of the project became public in late August.
Numerous companies are involved in developing Project Jupiter, mainly Austin-based BorderPlex Digital Assets as well as Stack Infrastructure and a still-unnamed AI tenant company.
Austin-based Oracle appears to be the most likely tenant of the massive facility. Larry Ellison, the company’s chairman and chief technology officer, vowed in an earnings call Sept. 9 that Oracle “will build and operate more cloud infrastructure data than all of our cloud infrastructure competitors combined.”
In exchange for not having to pay property taxes on the 1,400-acre campus, BorderPlex Digital said it will pay the county $360 million over 30 years – $12 million annually – which is an increase from an initial commitment of $300 million over the life of the deal.
Stack said this week it would separately give the county $50 million to fund badly needed water and wastewater infrastructure upgrades throughout Doña Ana County. Stack also committed to give $6.9 million for various community investments in the county, such as new Boys and Girls Club facilities.
While Project Jupiter has enjoyed significant support from elected officials in New Mexico, the mayor of Sunland Park on Tuesday called for county commissioners to delay their vote on the project.
“Before the County Commission commits to a deal of this scale, it must show the public exactly how they expect to secure the water, road capacity, and housing options needed for this project, not only for the expected incoming workers but for the families who already live here,” Sunland Park Mayor Javier Perea said in a statement. “Anything less would be gambling with the future of our community.”
Here are things to know about Project Jupiter ahead of the vote Friday in Las Cruces.
How much water will the Project Jupiter data center campus use?
The major questions surrounding Project Jupiter are how much water the campus will use and whether its usage is sustainable in a desert region that has experienced a long-term drought.
The campus would feature a “closed-loop” system of pipes to cool the computer servers inside the data center buildings, which developers say would require a one-time fill-up before the water is recycled over and over. Filling up the four data centers would require about 10 million gallons of water over two years. Developers said the campus’ ongoing consumption would be 7.2 million gallons of water every year that it’s operating.
The project would use a daily average of 20,000 gallons when it’s up and running, with a maximum consumption capped at 60,000 gallons in a day, according to figures provided by the developers.
Assuming those figures are accurate, Project Jupiter’s water usage would be manageable for water planners and is less than other big industrial employers in the area.
By comparison, El Paso Water supplies about 221,000 customers with 110 million gallons of water per day on average, and the Marathon Petroleum refinery in Central El Paso used an average of 1.1 million gallons daily last year, according to El Paso Water.
A Meta-owned data center that’s set to be built in Northeast El Paso has an agreement to use 750,000 gallons daily, initially, although El Paso Water officials have said the facility is unlikely to reach that level of usage.
The Camino Real Regional Utility Authority, or CRRUA, the New Mexico water utility that serves Sunland Park and Santa Teresa, said it produced an average of 2.6 million gallons of water daily from its wells in March. CRRUA will supply drinking water for the campus’ “ongoing operations” according to documents that detail the agreement between Doña Ana County and Project Jupiter’s developers.
But questions remain about where the electricity to power the campus will come from and how much water that part of the project will require.
Where will the electricity for Project Jupiter come from?
Project Jupiter’s developers have been more forthcoming about the campus’ water usage than about its expected electricity consumption. But, one thing is clear: the campus will use a gargantuan amount of power.
Lanham Napier, chairman of BorderPlex Digital Assets, in mid-July told New Mexico legislators during a presentation that the data center campus his company is proposing would require about one gigawatt of electricity capacity to operate. By comparison, El Paso Electric owns about 2.8 gigawatts of generation capacity across its entire system, according to the utility’s corporate sustainability report.
When New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham announced this data center project for the first time in February, El Paso Electric said it had worked “closely with BorderPlex Digital over the last two years to design the infrastructure required to support the project.”
“BorderPlex Digital and El Paso Electric have entered into agreements to power this hub of innovation,” the utility said in a news release.
However, in a statement to El Paso Matters provided last week, El Paso Electric said it does “not anticipate building any generation for this project.”
Instead, the project’s developers have said they’ll pay to develop their own “micro-grid” that’s essentially separate from the main regional power grid to ensure that “nobody’s power prices are going up,” as Napier said during an Aug. 26 meeting in Las Cruces.
During a community meeting Sept. 9 in Sunland Park, a consultant for BorderPlex Digital said the campus will rely on natural gas for electricity generation, at least initially.
“We are going to be starting out with natural gas” as the primary source of electricity, said Jennifer Bradfute, the consultant who works for BorderPlex Digital.
Bradfute’s comments suggest Project Jupiter will pay to construct its own natural gas-fired turbine. Still, one gigawatt of capacity could take years to develop. For reference, El Paso Electric spent four years developing the Newman 6 natural gas power plant, which has a capacity of 228 megawatts (less than a fourth of Project Jupiter’s capacity) and cost $217 million to build.
Bradfute also said Project Jupiter will have “one of the world’s largest battery storage projects out at the site” and that the site will gradually shift to rely largely on cleaner sources of electricity.
In general, batteries are used to capture solar or wind power during windy or sunny daytime hours and store it until the power is needed to solve for the intermittency of renewable generation. So, paying to build a massive battery array suggests the developers plan to eventually power the campus wholly or partially with solar panels.
“The reason why you need battery storage backup power is because you plan to have intermittent sources there that need that,” Bradfute said, referring to solar power sources.
But the companies behind Project Jupiter have some time to get there. The New Mexico Legislature passed a bill earlier this year that allows for the creation of micro-grids separate from the main grid that serves most homes and businesses.
The bill includes a carve-out that allows micro-grid operators to skirt the state’s Energy Transition Act. That law requires the big electric utilities in New Mexico to ensure half of the electricity they sell to customers comes from renewable, zero-carbon energy sources by 2035, and they have to reach 100% clean energy sales by 2045. As of this year, 40% of the electricity New Mexico utilities sell to customers has to come from zero-carbon sources.
For now, however, energy generated within a privately owned micro-grid “shall not be considered retail sales” until 2035, according to the text of House Bill 93. That means Project Jupiter can rely largely on fossil fuels for electricity generation for years to come, unlike the main electricity providers in the state.
“By 2045, all of the energy that a qualified microgrid generates and sells shall be from net-zero carbon resources,” the bill reads.
But, there’s still a key unanswered question about the project’s micro-grid: How much water will it use?
El Paso Electric operates several natural gas-fired power plant units in and around El Paso that supplied 42% of the electricity the utility supplied to customers last year.
The utility burns natural gas to heat water and create steam that spins turbines. That’s a water intensive process; the utility consumed about 19 million gallons of water daily last year, according to El Paso Water.
The contract and bond documents that detail the deal between Doña Ana County and Project Jupiter’s developers span more than 360 pages, but there’s no mention of water usage specifically for power generation.
For comparison, the Newman 6 unit consumed 0.39 gallons of water per kilowatt-hour of electricity it generated in 2024, according to El Paso Electric. That suggests a data center campus that requires one gigawatt of total capacity would use roughly 9 million gallons of water per day.
That’s a highly imprecise calculation. It assumes the campus would run at maximum capacity for 24 hours per day and rely entirely on natural gas-fired turbines that are comparable to Newman 6. But, even assuming the natural gas electricity generation unit for Project Jupiter would use one-tenth as much water as Newman 6, that would still suggest the campus’ water usage would far exceed the estimated 20,000 gallons of average daily consumption.
BorderPlex Digital Assets and Stack Infrastructure didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment about the water usage of the micro-grid’s electricity source. Doña Ana County referred questions to BorderPlex Digital.
Will my electricity bills go up because of Project Jupiter?
Another big question looming over data center developments in El Paso and across the United States is whether utility ratepayers are paying higher power bills to fund construction of infrastructure to serve data center customers – such as poles, wires, substations or sources of power generation.
In a paper published in March, electricity researchers at Harvard Law School wrote that some U.S. utilities are “forcing the public to pay for infrastructure designed to supply a handful of exceedingly wealthy corporations.”
“Utilities tell (public utility commissions) what they want to hear: that the deals for Big Tech isolate data center energy costs from other ratepayers’ bills and won’t increase consumers’ power prices,” the authors wrote. “But verifying this claim is all but impossible.”
However, the project’s developers as well as El Paso Electric have consistently said that the data campus will not increase electricity prices for El Paso Electric customers.
In a lengthy statement that El Paso Electric provided to El Paso Matters, the utility said data centers “should not raise rates for customers and we are working with any and all large load customers to ensure that they pay for the costs that are solely theirs.”
“Large load customers like data centers connect to our transmission system through a federally regulated process,” El Paso Electric said. “This process requires a detailed impact study, funded by the large load customer, that identifies any upgrades or improvements needed to support their operations. These studies ensure that the costs and responsibilities for infrastructure enhancements are clearly assigned to the large load customer.
“El Paso Electric is committed to ensuring that residential customers do not subsidize infrastructure costs associated with large-load customers, including data centers,” the utility said.
What’s the upside of Project Jupiter for Doña Ana County and the broader region?
Despite major public concerns about its water and electricity consumption, elected officials in Doña Ana County and throughout New Mexico have been supportive of Project Jupiter – although the call from Sunland Park city officials to delay Friday’s vote bucked that trend.
Gov. Lujan Grisham lauded the deal when she first announced it in February. The Doña Ana County Board of Commissioners voted 4-1 on Aug. 26 to advance the deal to a final vote Friday.
Michael Padilla, a New Mexico state senator, spoke in support of the project in front of a standing-room-only crowd gathered at Doña Ana Community College’s Sunland Park campus last week. And three New Mexico state representatives explained why they’re in favor of Project Jupiter in an opinion piece published Tuesday.
For one, Project Jupiter’s developers say the campus will require 2,500 construction jobs during the multi-year construction period. And once it’s built, 750 people will work full-time at the site and earn annual salaries ranging from $75,000 to $100,000.
In a region where people earn a median household income of about $60,000, that represents a significant economic opportunity for workers in the El Paso metropolitan area.
And while the $360 million in payments over 30 years is relatively small compared with the overall $165 billion investment, it’s still a sizable boon for the coffers of Doña Ana County.
The legally-binding commitment by Stack Infrastructure to give $50 million to Doña Ana County to “strengthen drinking water and wastewater systems” is also significant because of the legacy of poor drinking water in the area and the potential impact that funding could have to improve water and sewer systems.
Residents throughout Santa Teresa and Sunland Park for years have lived with drinking water containing unsafe levels of arsenic and other issues amid long-running underinvestment in water infrastructure and mismanagement by CRRUA’s former leadership.
Earlier this year, Sunland Park announced it would develop its own municipal water utility while Doña Ana County officials said they would take over CRRUA’s assets outside of Sunland Park and create a new water provider for the area.
Of that $50 million, $10 million would be “allocated specifically to the County to provide to the City of Sunland Park through a metrics-driven grant program,” according to Stack Infrastructure’s news release.
In a statement, the city of Sunland Park said it has had no formal discussions about that $10 million in funding and said “no commitments have been made.”
However, if that $10 million is allocated to the city of Sunland Park, it “could allow targeted upgrades to Sunland Park’s municipal water and wastewater systems to provide consistent and reliable service to the borderland community,” according to a statement from the Sunland Park Utility Department.
The department said the metrics in the grant program would gauge water quality, wastewater treatment and the consistency of water service.
“On the water side, that would mean strengthening supply through reliable wells and distribution system improvements. On the wastewater side, it would support both new improvements and rehabilitation of existing facilities to secure the long-term reliability of the City’s two wastewater treatment plants,” the statement read.
“These types of metrics would guide funding decisions, ensuring that every dollar produces tangible results for residents,” the statement read.
The post What you need to know as Doña Ana commissioners set to vote on $165 billion Project Jupiter data center near Santa Teresa appeared first on El Paso Matters.
Read: Read More