Oracle doubles job forecast for New Mexico AI data center to 1,500 permanent positions

Oracle says a big artificial intelligence data center going up in New Mexico will create twice as many permanent jobs as the company first thought, 1,500 positions once construction wraps up.

The company put out the revised numbers Friday. Executive Pradeep Vincent wrote on LinkedIn that the project “will deliver high-quality jobs, sustainable infrastructure, and long-term economic benefits to Doña Ana County.”

It’s part of a broader trend. Data centers have gone from being relatively uncontroversial to facing real opposition from communities. People living near these facilities and their local representatives worry the power-hungry operations will jack up electricity bills, drain water supplies, and won’t create many jobs after they’re built.

Tech companies have fought back with PR campaigns featuring TV commercials, studies that claim their facilities aren’t driving up costs, and promises they won’t harm local areas.

Oracle’s site goes by “Project Jupiter” and sits just a few miles north of the border with Mexico. It’s tied to a massive contract between Oracle and OpenAI called Stargate. Local protesters have focused mostly on what it might do to the environment. The company got tax incentives and government-backed bonds to help pay for it.

Company addresses environmental concerns

Oracle tried to ease the concerns. The data center will use about as much water as an office building, the company said, because the liquid cooling the servers gets reused over and over.

It’ll run entirely on gas generators sitting on the property instead of tapping into the public power grid, which Oracle says means “no impact to rate payers.” The company also plans to pay hundreds of millions to the county for schools and water systems.

The new mexico project isn’t happening in isolation

Last September, OpenAI, Oracle, and SoftBank announced five new AI data center sites around the country, including this one. Put together, they’re supposed to have nearly 7 gigawatts of capacity and represent over $400 billion in investment.

Another site near Milwaukee is being developed by OpenAI, Oracle, and Vantage. That one’s a nearly 1-gigawatt campus with four buildings expected to bring more than 4,000 construction jobs and over 1,000 permanent positions.

Microsoft’s been busy too, linking data centers in Wisconsin and Atlanta with fiber-optic cables. The company calls it an “AI Superfactory”, basically a networked system for training AI models.