Twelve US state attorneys general have asked federal regulators to approve a natural gas pipeline that would feed an Oracle data center in New Mexico. Their letter to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) supports fast-tracking the project.
The notable part is who isn’t on the list of supporters. New Mexico’s own attorney general, Raúl Torrez, is on the other side, pushing for a more thorough environmental review of the very project the coalition wants moved along.
What’s in the pipe
The project is called the Green Chile pipeline. It would run 17.8 miles through Doña Ana County, New Mexico.
A subsidiary of Energy Transfer LP operates the line. Once running, it is designed to move up to 400 million cubic feet of natural gas per day.
That gas has a single, very hungry customer in mind. It would power Bloom Energy fuel cells at Oracle’s Project Jupiter, a data center campus built to serve the growing demands of AI companies, particularly OpenAI.
The scale is hard to overstate. Project Jupiter is projected to reach a capacity of approximately 2.5 GW, with a potential investment of up to $165 billion.
Supporters point to the local payoff. The project is expected to create approximately 5,800 construction jobs and generate up to $1.1 billion in annual local economic output.
A delay already baked in
The pipeline has not had a smooth ride so far. Its anticipated in-service date has already slipped from August 15, 2026, to February 1, 2027.
The cause was a dispute over land. New Mexico’s state Land Office rejected the project’s requests for rights-of-way, forcing a reroute of the line onto federal land.
FERC completed an environmental assessment of the project in September 2026. Oracle then sent its own letter to the commission on October 13, 2026, and the 12-state coalition followed with its letter around October 15, 2026.
Oracle has also explored workarounds. One option it has considered is trucking in compressed natural gas, an attempt to limit how much the pipeline delays affect its project timeline and local hiring.
The fight over how deep to look
Environmental groups and Attorney General Torrez want FERC to widen its lens. They are calling for a comprehensive review that weighs the full impact of the data center itself, not just the 17.8 miles of pipe.
Their concerns center on local resources, including water use and emissions. In a desert region, a facility of this magnitude raises obvious questions about what it will draw from the surrounding environment.
This is the core disagreement in plain terms. One side wants regulators to judge the pipeline as a pipeline, while the other wants them to judge everything the pipeline makes possible.
What this means
When attorneys general from a dozen other states weigh in on a project located entirely within one state whose own top lawyer is skeptical, it shows how data centers have become a national policy question rather than a local zoning matter.
Energy Transfer sits on one side of that equation as the pipeline operator. Bloom Energy sits on another as the fuel cell supplier, and both have a direct interest in how quickly FERC moves.
The key thing to watch now is FERC’s next move. If the commission sides with the coalition and keeps the review narrow, the February 1, 2027, target could hold. If it agrees with Torrez and the environmental groups that the data center’s full footprint deserves scrutiny, that date may prove as movable as the last one.
Disclosure: This article was edited by Diego Almada Lopez. For more information on how we create and review content, see our Editorial Policy.