Oracle’s offices in the Pipera business district of Bucharest, photographed at night. Credit: Darius Popa / TNW Oracle is trucking compressed natural gas to AI data centres that cannot yet connect to a pipeline, at roughly four times the price of gas at a hub. Europe has the same grid bottleneck and is answering it the other way, with Spain proposing to refuse connections to any data centre not on 80% renewables every hour. Oracle is trucking compressed natural gas to data centres it cannot plug in.
Road deliveries kept a site outside Salt Lake City moving for more than a year while it waited for a pipeline, and are powering early work at an OpenAI campus in Shackelford County, Texas. The shares fell about 5.5%. New Mexico is next. Oracle is weighing the same approach at Project Jupiter, where the New Mexico State Land Office refused rights-of-way for Energy Transfer’s pipeline twice and the start date slipped to February, Bloomberg reported.
Oracle did not reply to its request for comment, then posted about one of its gas suppliers on social media shortly after receiving it. Certarus supplied the Utah deliveries and VoltaGrid the Texas ones, in what the industry calls a virtual pipeline. Gas is drawn from a real one, compressed into a trailer, driven for hours, then decompressed. We reported in September that Jupiter would run on up to 2.45 GW of Bloom Energy fuel cells burning gas, and that Oracle had sent its developer a force majeure notice.
It is an expensive way to buy electricity. Delivered, it runs about four times the price of gas at a major hub once labour, equipment and the trucks’ own fuel are counted, East Daley Analytics told Bloomberg. Powering 100 MW of that footprint this way would mean each large trailer supplying roughly 40 minutes of electricity, according to SemiAnalysis. The bottleneck is the same on both sides of the Atlantic.
Nscale’s £2B Essex site, with Microsoft as anchor tenant, cannot get 90 MW in time for a planned 2027 opening, and some British grid waits run close to a decade. Denmark stopped taking applications altogether. Its grid operator Energinet halted all new connection agreements this year, facing a queue of roughly 60 GW against national peak demand of 7 GW. Europe’s answer to that is not a truck.
A draft Spanish decree would require new data centres above 1 MW to meet 80% of demand hourly from renewables or lose their grid connection, giving projects already in permitting six months to comply without compensation. Oracle’s free cash flow is negative and expected to stay that way until the sites are finished. Which is the pressure behind all of this. AI had already set off the largest gas-plant building boom on record before anyone started driving the fuel in by road.
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