SANTA TERESA, New Mexico (Border Report) – Construction crews have begun clearing brush and working on the road leading to the planned $165 billion Project Jupiter data center in Doña Ana County, N.M.
The 3 million square-foot facility off Pete Domenici Highway will not only bring more than 3,000 permanent and temporary jobs to Southern New Mexico and West Texas, but also provide a spark to local businesses, universities, the housing and solar power industries, a local expert says.
“It’s going to bring in a lot of capital investment, we are counting on that,” said Jerry Pacheco, president and CEO of the Border Industrial Association. “We are already working with Project Jupiter to make sure they get in front of New Mexican companies, so we get a shot at supplying – from construction services to consulting to landscaping to feeding all these people.”
The project spearheaded by Oracle and OpenAI will also impact the speed and accuracy of searches you make online through a personal computer or smartphone. It is part of a half-a-trillion-dollar initiative called Stargate the White House announced last January to strengthen artificial intelligence development in the United States.
“Every time you use your smartphone, that request you are making is going to a data center, and the data center is generating the AI that answers your question,” Pacheco said.
Likewise, every time you engage an AI chatbot such as ChatGPT, which is owned by OpenAI, the conversation thread will be generated in a data center.
Project Jupiter will have four data centers where AI servers will interpret enormous amounts of data. In addition to generating human-like responses for your chat, these centers will be involved in more practical tasks such as network security and fraud detection, image recognition and optimizing business processes, among others.
The data centers do this using some of the most advanced computer chips ever produced, and Pacheco says that is what makes Project Jupiter so expensive.
“It’s not only the infrastructure to the site; it’s the building. It’s the horizontal and vertical infrastructure to build the data center,” Pacheco said. “But what’s really expensive in data centers are the chips in the servers. You have to replace those every 4 to 6 years because a brand-new chip comes out. So, you’re constantly replacing these super expensive chips.”
The estimated cost of Project Jupiter’s processing chips hasn’t been disclosed. Last month, OpenAI and international chip maker NVIDIA announced they would invest up to $100 billion to support data center capacity using the next-generation Vera Rubin platform.
Fast-moving project
Doña Ana County gave the green light to Project Jupiter barely last month, yet video taken Thursday by KTSM along Pete Domenici Road and aerial footage taken by Border Report show basic road work is ongoing.
Several residents at Dona Ana County meetings questioned the impact Project Jupiter will have on the environment, water and electricity supplies.
Pacheco, whose nonprofit promotes industrial development in New Mexico, said he had similar concerns and has since gotten answers from company representatives.
Project Jupiter intends to produce its own gas-generated electricity for now and possibly incorporate solar-generated power later. Its four coolers will initially require a 625,000-gallon water “charge,” recycle it and thereafter a daily infusion of 20,000 gallons a day, Pacheco said.
That’s a fraction of what a 100,000 square-foot water park would use, according to trade sources.
“Eventually, the county (the city of) Sunland Park and our association are going to build a desalination plant,” Pacheco said. “We are sitting on an ocean of brackish water that can be a generational source of water for decades to come, and the data center could be possibly tied into that in the future.”
That’s the Mesilla Bolson aquifer that stretches well into Mexico, according to New Mexico State University.
Pacheco said Project Jupiter is coming to a desert area of New Mexico, where the environmental impact will be localized. The nearest housing development is several miles away, and its neighbors are warehouses, factories, solar farms and an intermodal railroad facility.
“We’re finishing our third solar farm. We have one that’s about 220 acres. We just inaugurated the Milagro solar farm, which is about 150 megawatts, and they are finishing another one, 150 acres just north of the Santa Teresa port of entry,” he said. “One thing we have is a lot of land and a lot of sun. Those combinations are perfect for solar farms.”
The suddenness of Project Jupiter is raising some concerns about whether locals will be the ones hired to run the data centers.
NMSU and the University of Texas at El Paso will have to step up to develop and train AI engineers.
Local universities will have to develop new training programs to produce the local talent to fill these positions.
“We have two great universities with great engineering programs. But we’re going to have to generate the jobs that the data centers need,” Pacheco said. “To Project Jupiter’s credit, they’ve already done outreach to NMSU, local institutions here, and our association to help them find training programs. So, we have a little bit of time, a couple of years here, to get our act together and get to a position where we’re directing local people to occupy these jobs.”
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