Saturday marks the anniversary of the day Doña Ana County commissioners approved $165 billion in industrial revenue bonds for Project Jupiter — the Santa Teresa site that is intended to host artificial intelligence infrastructure for companies like Oracle and OpenAI.
In the past year, the data center, with a campus larger than New York’s Central Park, has spurred protests, lawsuits and fierce pushback over concerns about its environmental impact and transparency.
Despite the wrangling, the data center’s construction is moving forward. And New Mexico State University engineering and science students at a recent career fair learned Wednesday how they can become part of it.
Julia Gentin/The New Mexican
Students lined up for the chance to hand their resumes to companies like Lockheed Martin and Los Alamos National Laboratory. Also present in the crowded third floor ballroom of Corbett Center? Employers from companies behind Project Jupiter.
Notably, these companies did not include the Project Jupiter moniker in their presentations, advertisements and job descriptions during the career expo.
One highly trafficked booth belonged to Bloom Energy, the company set to produce fuel cells that will power the data center once the air quality permit is approved.
An upperclassman pursuing a bachelor’s degree in engineering could be paid $36-40 an hour during their internship in San Jose, Calif., according to job descriptions, helping produce the very technology proposed back in Southern New Mexico.
Or, a student could take up a career as a data center technician for STACK Infrastructure — another Project Jupiter developer — after a three-month training developed by STACK and Oracle at Doña Ana Community College. They would make $40 an hour to “play a vital role in powering the infrastructure that supports the world’s most important digital systems.”
And for NMSU students with an interest in construction, Clayco — a prominent data center construction firm partnering with Oracle and STACK to build Project Jupiter — advertised a $25 hourly wage for an internship from May to August.
Julia Gentin is a reporter for The Las Cruces New Mexican, The Santa Fe New Mexican and Searchlight New Mexico through a partnership with Report for America, a national service program that places journalists into local newsrooms. She covers the Southern New Mexico region. Learn more about Report for America at reportforamerica.org.
