SANTA TERESA, N.M. – One of the largest data centers in the country is rising from the parched scrub desert of southern New Mexico. Most county officials are agog at the jobs and investment this high tech mega-project has promised to bring. But many locals are asking: can chile and pecan farming co-exist with Project Jupiter?
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The scaleof the project befuddles the brain.
At 1,400 acres, it could swallow New York’s Central Park. With two-and-a-half gigawatts of electricity, it could power more than half of New Mexico. And $165 billion in investment capital—if developers reach that goal—could pick up the tab for 40 Artemis moon shots.
Yes, these clever comparisons were suggested by artificial intelligence—which is powered by data centers like Project Jupiter. But as they might say down in Doña Ana County: you can’t water pecans with data.
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“I have a little plot of land out here, grow some pecans,” says Eddie Estrada, a weekend farmer who works at the state capital. “I had 28 trees, but due to the water shortage many of them died.”
Today, the lower Rio Grande is a river of sand most of the year. Blame a searing drought, low snowpack, and climate change. Estrada’s water deliveries from the river have dried up, and he has to keep drilling his well deeper as the water table drops. Project Jupiter is six miles from his property near the New Mexico – Texas border. And he’s well aware that data centers typically require large volumes of water to cool their server farms that run 24/7.
“Being that we’re in a drought, and then to allow a project like this to use that much water,” Estrada says, “the fear is that we’re going to run out, not only for us that live here but the farmers.”
Oracle and OpenAI
Project Jupiter’s tenants will be global tech giants Oracle and OpenAI. What sets Jupiter apart from most of the 3,000 new data centers being planned or built in the US is its gargantuan size, the fact that it will generate its own electricity, and its remote location— smack-dab in the Chihuahuan desert, says Ahmed Saeed, a data center expert at Georgia Institute of Technology.
“It’s bizarre to me why that site was selected,” Saeed says.
Finding water in the Chihuahuan desert
To allay fears of being a water hog, Jupiter has purchased existing water rights from a sod farm, located just west of Sunland Park, New Mexico, for the millions of gallons needed to cool the acres of hard drives and routers. (Look for the sod farm’s three irrigated green circles on this Google Map)
New Mexico State Engineer Elizabeth Anderson—the state’s official groundwater cop—says she is confident the huge new customer will not over-pump groundwater.
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“What’s happening with Project Jupiter is they’re just taking a water right that exists,” she says, “and using it for something else, having a data center. And it’s not gonna be taking water away from farmers.”
And yet, no one is certain how much water the hyperscale data center will need because the numbers keep changing.
After a report in the earlier this year that the project would need a million gallons a day, the developers changed course. Oracle announced a switch from water-intensive natural-gas turbines as their source of electricity to fuel cells, which use far less water and have lower emissions. Now, Oracle is saying the data center and fuel cell system together will use about 11 million gallons of non-potable water that will be recycled in closed-loop systems.
But lots of folks remain skeptical, chiefly because of the way the venture—the biggest in state history—was presented by the Doña Ana Board of County Commissioners.
“I, like so many of the constituents I represent, were very surprised to see that our county commission here in Doña Ana was taking a $165 billion vote on a proposal that we knew about for less than a month,” says State Rep. Micaela Lara Cadena (D-Las Cruces) who attended the rowdy public meeting last September.
The commissioners were voting on whether to issue $165 billion in industrial revenue bonds for Project Jupiter. Industrial revenue bonds are a common economic development tool that give a tax abatement to new industry but don’t put the county into debt. The companies sell their own bonds and do their own financing.
Cadena says attendees asked the county commission to delay the vote by at least by a month.
“Give us more time to get some answers to these really critical questions,” she says. “They (Jupiter) said, ‘If you don’t vote ‘yes’ today we’re going somewhere else.’ And our county commission bowed to that pressure.”
When four of the five commissioners voted yes, people in the audience erupted, angrily shouting, “Recall!” which can be heard on this recording.
Today, nine months later, popular resistance to Project Jupiter seems to have grown. Susana Chaparro is the lone commissioner who voted “no.” She’s still seeking answers.
How much water will they actually use? How big will the permanent workforce be? Will the AI bubble burst and leave the county with a giant empty warehouse?
“Most of us got excited about this huge data center coming in with all this money that was going to be thrown around without really thinking: what is it going to look like in one year?” she says, over a plate of with red chile at her unofficial office, a booth at Nopalito Cafe in Las Cruces. “What is it gonna look like in three, five, 20, 30 years? I don’t think that was thought out.”
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Just then, a woman sitting in the booth behind us, who had overheard the interview, stands up and chimes in. She gives her name as Ruby Estrada and says she’s an environmental consultant.
“This is a desert and not a lot of water comes our way,” she says. “So the idea of a data center is just kind of wild, and it really makes me think that people are not listening to the land itself.”
A county desperate for economic development
Doña Ana County, in fact, needs investment, with low incomes, high unemployment, and one in four children experiencing poverty. What’s more, the county has 40 informal settlements known as colonias along the border that need paved roads, sewers and public transportation.
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Jupiter is promising to create hundreds of high tech jobs. And in lieu of paying property taxes—which would be in the billions—the developers have pledged $360 million for schools and local infrastructure, $50 million for an upgrade to the decrepit local water utility, and $12 million annually to the county budget.
“We’ve never had that type of money here in Doña Ana County,” says Manny Sanchez, chairman of the county commission. “And we’ve always tried to find these types of high-paying jobs for our residents.”
He thinks the data center will be “transformative.”
“This isn’t by any means gonna completely, like, fund us for everything, Sanchez says. “But it’s going to allow us to be able to start doing more for our residents in ways that we have never done before.”
Davin Lopez, CEO of the Mesilla Valley Economic Development Alliance, is also giddy: “This is by far larger than anything we’ve ever seen.” He says their computer program that measures economic impact only goes up to nine figures.
“We are actually upgrading our software that we subscribe to for impact analysis because it doesn’t go up to the billions!” he says.
There’s a new twist to the Project Jupiter saga.
Last month, the US Supreme Court approved a sweeping interstate water compact that will take away water rights along the lower Rio Grande. The settlement will require New Mexico to buy outcurrent water users and retire 9,200 acres of irrigated farmland over the next decade. That is expected to leave more water in the Rio Grande for Texas, which brought the lawsuit.
The Center for Biological Diversity opposes Jupiter’s plans to draw groundwater from the lower Rio Grande basin. The Tucson-based nonprofit has submitted a protest letter to the State Engineer’s office, warning that the project puts New Mexico “at greater risk of violating the Rio Grande Compact.”
The Center’s Santa Fe-based attorney, Colin Cox, points out that the sod farm has not been using all of its allotted water rights—2,400 acre-feet per year. (An acre-foot is enough water to cover an acre of land a foot deep.)
“Will that water even be there” when Jupiter needs it? Cox asks, “or is it just water on paper?”
In a Project Jupiter fact sheet, developers contend that its total water use will remain “below historic levels” of the sod farm.
On a warm afternoon in early May, a father and his two sons were flying a kite on the dune-like riverbed of the Rio Grande—a stark snapshot of the ongoing drought.
Eusebio Ingol Blanco, a water resources engineer and assistant professor at New Mexico State University in Las Cruces, sits at a picnic table overlooking the once-wet river.
The Rio Grande is the major source of replenishment for the already overtaxed aquifer in the region.
“The river is dry there,” he says, pointing to the sandy bottom. “For that reason, groundwater levels reduce—more than one or two feet per year.”
Rep. Micaela Lara Cadena, the leading opponent of Project Jupiter in the Democrat-controlled New Mexico legislature, is not placated by assurances from the state engineer that there’s enough groundwater for the data center.
“Water policymakers like me are figuring out how to retire farmland to give us a future,” she says, “and then we’re turning around and putting water to a new use—massive amounts of water in hyper-scaled AI data centers.”
In nearby Chamberino, New Mexico, located between Las Cruces and El Paso, Texas, it’s planting season at Seco Spice, a wholesale chile company. Owner Edward Ogaz grows 500 acres of New Mexico green chiles, ancho, cayenne, habanero, and paprika and sells to outfits like Taco Bell and Trader Joe’s. He is also president of the New Mexico Chile Association.
One morning last month, Ogaz walked along the furrows behind a machine pulled by a tractor that is jabbing scorpion peppers into the loamy earth. Ogaz, too, worries about the future of water he relies on to flood his fields.
“Everyone has a straw in the drink, being the basin that runs up and down this valley,” he says. “If you don’t have water, all you have is dirt.”
But he believes Project Jupiter’s promise that they won’t use more water than the sod farm is allotted, and won’t affect neighboring farmers.
“I’ve got to say it’s not really going to affect us in the long run,” Ogaz says. “And if they’ve done their permitting process, I think it works. I think it’s good for Doña Ana County. I think it’s a great economic boost.”
Despite his support, he thinks the way the county hurriedly presented Project Jupiter to the public was “a fiasco,” and if the data center’s grand plans do not come to fruition, “then shame on us, shame on the state and the permitting people that allowed this to go through.”
While the handwringing continues, construction races forward at the worksite two miles north of the Mexican border. Earthmovers and concrete trucks are building what looks like a small city. An Oracle official says if construction proceeds as planned, they expect to power up the computers by the end of this year.
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