Oracle has been trucking compressed natural gas to some of its artificial intelligence data centres to keep construction and early operations on schedule while permanent pipelines catch up, Bloomberg reported, citing people familiar with the work — a workaround that costs roughly four times the price of pipelined gas and sent the company's shares down about 5.5% after publication.

The AI boom has reached the point where one of the world's biggest cloud companies is paying around four times the going rate to have natural gas driven to its servers by truck. The premium underscores how price-insensitive AI developers become when project timing is at stake, and how far they will go to secure supply.

Truck deliveries powered a data centre on the outskirts of Salt Lake City, Utah, for more than a year before a pipeline was completed, according to the report. The same approach is now supporting initial construction work at a campus that Oracle is building for OpenAI in Shackelford County, Texas, as the company races to bring new capacity online.

Project Jupiter Under Pressure

Oracle is also considering trucked gas for Project Jupiter in New Mexico, one of its most important sites, where a pipeline delay is threatening the timeline. Last month, the company sent the project's developer a notice citing force majeure, a contractual provision that may shield Oracle from some payments if the delays continue.

Pipeline operator Energy Transfer had to reroute the line after state regulators rejected the original route, a decision that pushed the pipeline's targeted start-up from this summer into next year.

A Costly Workaround

The workaround is expensive. Trucked deliveries are sometimes described as a 'virtual pipeline': natural gas compressed so it occupies a fraction of its usual volume and can be hauled by road to sites that permanent pipes have not yet reached. Once labour, specialised equipment and fuel are included, trucked gas costs roughly four times the price of gas delivered through a major pipeline hub, according to one energy analyst cited in the report.

The scale is also daunting. Powering just 100 megawatts of Project Jupiter's planned 2.45 gigawatts this way would mean each large trailer supplying only about 40 minutes of electricity, an analyst at a chip and AI research firm said. By that arithmetic, keeping even a slice of the site running on trucks would require a steady rotation of trailers.

Power Has Become the Binding Constraint

The episode shows how power, rather than chips, has become the binding constraint on the AI build-out — and how far companies will now go to avoid delays. New energy infrastructure routinely takes longer to route, approve and build than the facilities it is meant to power, leaving developers to choose between idling projects and paying whatever bridging supply costs. Oracle has staked billions of dollars and reputation on delivering capacity quickly, and its free cash flow is expected to stay negative until more of these sites are complete.

The roughly 5.5% drop in Oracle shares reflects investor sensitivity to any sign that power constraints could delay AI capacity and push out the timeline for the company's free cash flow to turn positive. The force majeure notice on Project Jupiter also raises the risk of disputes and delays at one of Oracle's most important sites.

Paying a premium for energy fits a wider argument made this week by writer Derek Thompson, who has argued that the AI boom is bidding up electricity and other inputs for the rest of the economy.

A New Source of Demand for Natural Gas

For gas markets, the episode points to data centre demand becoming a meaningful new source of consumption — joining export terminals and seasonal heating among the forces shaping gas demand — and to a niche boom for virtual pipeline suppliers such as Certarus and VoltaGrid, which truck compressed gas to customers awaiting permanent connections. Gas pipeline operators such as Energy Transfer stand to benefit from the same urgency.

The key test ahead will be whether trucked gas can scale at Project Jupiter, whether the New Mexico pipeline arrives on its revised schedule, and whether the force majeure notice escalates into a formal dispute with the project's developer.