SANTA TERESA — It was Phoenix native King Kincaid’s first day on the job Thursday, but his mother had already worked for a month at the Project Jupiter site for Clayco, a prominent data center construction firm.
“I don’t like data centers,” said Kincaid, 20, who moved to El Paso for the job, just across the state line. “My mom, she has a very different outlook on everything. She enjoys it because she’s always been a hardworking woman. … I feel like she found her place.”
Their apartment complex in El Paso is filled with construction workers, he said. He had heard Project Jupiter was “the biggest data center in Texas.”
Image from New Mexican video
Kincaid was right about the size — Project Jupiter’s acreage is over 1,000 football fields, and it’s expected to become one of the largest data centers in the nation. But he was wrong about the state.
Kincaid was one of over 100 construction workers who attended a safety orientation Thursday at Project Jupiter. Work has continued moving forward on the massive data center campus, which is aimed at supporting artificial intelligence for Oracle and OpenAI, despite a state Supreme Court order last week placing two key permitting processes on hold.
Oracle, a developer of the controversial project, has said hiring local is a top priority, but the company has been unable to track a place of residence for the vast majority of the more than 2,100 workers at the site.
License plates in the employee parking lot are from a range of places: Tamaulipas, Mexico, to Iowa to Mississippi. Several of the employees, like Kincaid, said they are opposed to the very data center they are building.
Carson Emery, one out-of-state critic of data centers who started working at the site in January with Concrete Strategies, said he hasn’t worked alongside a single New Mexican.
Oracle identified 189 Doña Ana County residents and 404 New Mexico residents out of 2,105 construction workers at the site as of June 30, Kathryn Gunter, senior director of state government affairs at Oracle, wrote in an email to a Doña Ana County official. The document was obtained through a public records request.
“At that time, approximately 1,600 records could not be matched to a ZIP code,” Gunter wrote.
According to a statement from Oracle, provided last week by Julia Allyn Fishel, the number of local residents working on the project “was not a required component of the official report.”
Still, an Oracle spokesperson stated, the data was shared with the Doña Ana County commissioners at their request. “The numbers were gathered through voluntary self-reporting by employees,” the spokesperson added.
Workforce information is reported quarterly to the New Mexico Department of Workforce Solutions, according to a statement from STACK, another Project Jupiter developer, provided by Nikki Wheeler.
But the department told The New Mexican on Aug 19, in response to a request for the information, that “no responsive records exist at this time.”
The gap in information about the construction workers has drawn criticism from at least one Southern New Mexico lawmaker.
“For a multibillion-dollar corporation that prides itself on data collection and storage and organization for their clients, the fact that they cannot identify 1,600 addresses is remarkable to me,” said Rep. Sarah Silva, D-Las Cruces. “My interpretation of this is they do not care, that they have a self-interest to build this as quickly as possible. And they told us that they cared about hiring local people, but their actions are telling me otherwise.”
Screenshot from STACK Infrastructure vide
Bustling construction site
Just three miles from the Santa Teresa border crossing, signs off N.M. 136 advertise Project Miner, another moniker for Project Jupiter. The site is bustling, even as critical permits related to water use and proposed fuel cell technology to power the facility were put on hold, and as a natural gas pipeline for the project through state trust land has not received authorization from the State Land office.
The Supreme Court’s order halts an air quality permit process pending before the New Mexico Environment Department for a power plant and a water use permit already granted by the State Engineer’s Office.
Since April, an emergency well had pumped more than 103 million gallons of fresh water for the data center, according to meter readings the Center for Biological Diversity obtained from the State Engineer’s Office.
One of the Supreme Court orders has halted the groundwater pumping, at least temporarily, from the new well.
At the site’s entrance during a visit Thursday, large tankers sprayed water across the arid dirt, concrete trucks circulated drums of material and cranes transported steel beams onto buildings that were already visibly vertical.
The industrial work stood in sharp contrast with its surroundings: yucca plants, mountains and dirt trails.
Farther down the road, a fence with a black screen blocked much of the construction work from view.
‘They don’t tell us much’
To Emery, whose company relocated him from Houston to Southern New Mexico to work on Project Jupiter, the construction behind the fence is separate from the data center itself: “We just pour concrete. We’re just the foundation.”
Emery told The New Mexican the pay is “a lot” — his hourly wage is in the “upper $30s” per hour for 50 to 60 hours a week — but he is critical of what he’s building.
“I’m not a fan of the data centers,” he said. “They’re taking all of our [explective] water. … It’s kind of [expletive] that we’re giving it to [expletive] AI, but big corporations seem to win.”
Emery said he hopes New Mexico shuts down all future data centers. His boss mentioned the state Supreme Court stays, he added, but he didn’t think the permitting pauses would actually slow work at the site.
Generally, the supervisors keep the workers updated “zero,” he said: “They don’t tell us much.”
If work were to stop at the Project Jupiter site, Emery wouldn’t be too concerned: “I’d just find another job,” he said.
Work even seemed to continue Thursday at Project Jupiter’s West Microgrid site, where natural gas turbines would have been built. However, developers have withdrawn an application for the contentious plan in favor of fuel cells.
The fuel cell-powered microgrid would operate on the main campus; the West Microgrid site is, in theory, obsolete.
Still, “They’ve been moving that dirt for a while,” Emery said.
Trucks actively pumped water out of a large holding tank at the West Microgrid site.
The fuel cell system would emit about 10.1 million tons of greenhouse gases a year, measured in carbon dioxide equivalent, compared to about 14 million tons from two gas plants previously proposed.
“As to why they would be continuing to develop a site where as far as we know, they’re not planning to build anything, that’s a great question,” said Colin Cox, an attorney for the Center for Biological Diversity. “I don’t have a full picture of everything that’s happening because so much of this has been shrouded in secrecy.”
‘Doña Ana County-first’
Developers have “already participated in multiple New Mexico-based hiring fairs and outreach events,” according to the statement from an Oracle spokesperson.
“Project Jupiter continues to take a Doña Ana County-first hiring approach, which has resulted in the rapid growth of the local workforce onsite and will be augmented in the coming months through several local workforce initiatives,” the spokesperson wrote.
The STACK spokesperson said among a group taking part in the company’s Critical Operations Development Academy, a data center training initiative, “47% of participants are Doña Ana County residents.”
However, there are only 23 participants that group, the spokesperson added.
Julia Gentin is a reporter for 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.
