Oracle Moves Gas by Trucks to Keep Its AI Data Centers on Schedule
Oracle is trucking compressed natural gas to AI data centers that cannot yet connect to a pipeline, at roughly four times the price of gas at a hub. Europe faces a similar grid bottleneck, with Spain proposing to refuse connections to any data center not relying on 80% renewables every hour.
Oracle's site outside Salt Lake City was kept running for over a year with road deliveries while waiting for a pipeline, powering early work at an OpenAI campus in Shackelford County, Texas. These deliveries are also under consideration for Project Jupiter in New Mexico, where the state land office twice refused rights-of-way for the pipeline.
Deliveries by road have become a solution in the absence of pipelines, but they are expensive. Certarus supplied the Utah deliveries and VoltaGrid the Texas ones, creating a virtual pipeline where gas is compressed, transported, and decompressed.
The bottleneck is a global issue. Nscale's Essex site, with Microsoft as anchor tenant, cannot secure 90 MW for its planned 2027 opening, and some British grid waits stretch close to a decade. Denmark has even stopped taking applications altogether.
In contrast, Europe is responding with stricter renewable energy requirements. A draft Spanish decree would mandate that new data centers above 1 MW meet 80% of their hourly demand from renewables or lose their grid connection.
Oracle's cash flow is negative and expected to remain so until its data centers are finished. The pressure stems from the boom in gas-plant construction driven by AI's increasing energy demands.