Summary

  • Of the five communities Oracle itself named for its OpenAI-partnered AI infrastructure, only one — Abilene, Texas — has independently corroborated operational capacity: two buildings, 980,000 square feet and more than 200 MW of IT load, already used by Oracle Cloud Infrastructure to serve OpenAI, on a campus where eight more buildings remain under construction.
  • The rest of the roster is a study in gradation: Project Jupiter in New Mexico is 26 percent complete by Oracle's own testimony under a state Supreme Court stay of its air-quality permit process; Saline Township, Michigan has two of three buildings framed; Port Washington, Wisconsin is permitted but its grid interconnection remains under review; and Shackelford County, Texas exists only on Oracle's roster and a single unverifiable report.

The roster and the method

Announcements travel faster than concrete. On January 26, 2026, Oracle published a post on its corporate newsroom committing the company to AI infrastructure in 2026 and naming the five communities that will host it: Abilene and Shackelford County in Texas, Doña Ana County in New Mexico, Port Washington in Wisconsin and Saline Township in Michigan Oracle newsroom. The framing was confident — new capacity, local jobs, community commitments — and the five names have since functioned as the reference list for nearly every claim about where Oracle's OpenAI-partnered capacity is actually being built.

A roster, however, is not delivery. The five names describe intentions and contracts; they say nothing by themselves about energized buildings, issued permits, interconnection studies or financing that has actually closed. Between "Oracle says it will build here" and "this community hosts Oracle AI capacity today" sits the entire machinery of American infrastructure: land, water, gas, transmission, courtrooms and county meetings. That machinery is where this audit looks.

The method is deliberately mechanical. Each of the five communities is graded by what the record outside Oracle shows, using a four-tier ladder. Tier one is confirmed operational capacity: buildings energized and serving the named tenant's workloads, corroborated by multiple records, including dated, utility-scale energization milestones. Tier two is verified unfinished construction: physical construction, permits and financing verified through official or independent records, with no delivered capacity.

Tier three is permitted and early-stage: regulatory permissions and interconnection processes verified, with build progress visible only through single or headline-level records. Tier four is a vendor roster entry or a single secondary source: a name on the company's own list, with no independent status record.

Three ground rules apply throughout. Vendor progress claims — schedule confidence, tax revenue, completion percentages — are attributed to Oracle and never restated as verified fact. Official records — court actions, state permits, interconnection reviews — are treated as the strongest evidence available and stated as facts, with their precise character preserved: a stay of a permit process is not a ruling on a project's merits. And where a figure could not be verified from a readable record, it is excluded rather than hedged; a smaller number of checkable statements beats a longer list of uncheckable ones.

BTW's earlier coverage examined Oracle's aggregate financing picture — the external loans behind its data-center build-out and the counterparty-funded capacity they imply. This article stays deliberately at ground level. The five communities are where Oracle's aggregate promises either land on the ground or do not, and the difference between the two is exactly what a site-level record can show.

Abilene: the one confirmed site

If the question is where Oracle's AI capacity can be physically counted today, the answer is Abilene. The campus west of the city — on land and electrical infrastructure owned by Lancium, developed by Crusoe, with Oracle as the customer — is the only one of the five communities with confirmed operational capacity. Per developer Crusoe, as reported by Data Center Dynamics, the first two buildings are operational, totaling 980,000 square feet and supporting more than 200 MW of IT load, and they are being used by Oracle Cloud Infrastructure to serve OpenAI Data Center Dynamics.

The power story behind those two buildings is unusually well documented for this sector, and it is the reason Abilene clears the highest evidence bar. Contractor Mortenson's project record dates the milestones: the first transformer at the site's 1 GW, 345 kV substation was energized on December 19, 2025, and the substation was fully energized by March 10, 2026 — running on temporary transformers in the interim, with permanent units expected to swap in by October 2026 Mortenson. Dated energization milestones from the contractor, aligned with independent trade-press confirmation of operational buildings, are what separate Abilene from every other entry on the roster.

Abilene is also not finished — and the construction record is itself part of the confirmation. In a briefing to Abilene officials reported by KTXS, executives from Lancium and Crusoe described eight buildings under construction through the first quarter of 2027, roughly 9,000 craft workers on site each day, and a campus heading toward approximately 4 million square feet KTXS.

One caution belongs in the record: the sources frame Abilene's scale differently. Data Center Dynamics counts the operational footprint — two buildings, 200 MW and change. The KTXS account describes the campus build-out — eight buildings, thousands of workers, millions of square feet. Both are accurate descriptions of different things, and neither is a total. Readers who quote a single Abilene number should know which one they are quoting.

What makes Abilene the exception is not its size but its redundancy of evidence. A developer's announcement, a contractor's dated energization log and local television coverage of a public briefing agree on the same physical facts. No other Oracle site in this audit comes close to that standard today.

Project Jupiter: the contested center

Doña Ana County, New Mexico — Project Jupiter — is the largest and most consequential entry on the roster, and the one where the distance between announcement and record is widest. Bloomberg reporting describes roughly $18 billion in construction loans from about 20 banks behind the campus, with Stack Infrastructure, a unit of Blue Owl Capital, as developer and planned Bloom Energy gas fuel cells among its power arrangements; the campus is designed around 2.45 GW Financial Post.

Oracle's own progress claims set the baseline the company will be measured against. On September 8, 2026, Mahesh Thiagarajan, an Oracle executive vice president, told county officials that the AI data center being built for Oracle and OpenAI was 26 percent complete, with 3,686 construction personnel on site, including 466 Doña Ana County residents, according to the Albuquerque Journal Albuquerque Journal. That figure is Oracle's testimony, relayed by local press — useful precisely because it is the company's own number, but not an independent engineering assessment.

The regulatory surface around that testimony is under visible strain: the New Mexico Supreme Court has paused the project's air-quality permit process — a procedural stay of a permit process, not a ruling on the project's merits — and the campus's energy inputs carry reported dates. An Energy Transfer gas pipeline serving the site has slipped to February 1, 2027, and a decision on a fuel-cell air-quality permit is due by November 23, 2026, per the same record that documents the county testimony and the dispute around it.

Into that picture, on September 24, TechCrunch — citing Bloomberg — reported that Oracle had sent a force majeure notice to the project's developer. The reporting describes the notice as seeking payment deferral if the 2.45 GW campus misses its 2028 online target, not as an exit from the tenancy TechCrunch. Two boundaries matter here. The contractual effect of a force majeure notice is explicitly uncertain in the underlying reporting — what it would actually compel, defer or excuse is unknown until it is tested. And a notice between contracting parties is not a court ruling; it changes the negotiation, not the law.

Oracle's public position holds both lines at once: the company states that Project Jupiter remains on its planned schedule, even as the reported notice contemplates what happens if it is not. Oracle's own data-center hub strikes the same confident tone, claiming the project has already delivered nearly $80 million in state and county tax revenue and counting about 700 New Mexico residents working onsite Oracle. Those are vendor claims about revenue and headcount — they describe intent and local benefit, and they are not independent verification of construction progress.

The independent press has kept its own account. The Wall Street Journal's analysis of what it calls cracks in Oracle's AI data-center build-out — as they appear in this massive New Mexico project — is paywalled; only its verified opening was available to this audit, and that boundary is stated rather than papered over The Wall Street Journal. Searchlight New Mexico's running coverage of Project Jupiter documents construction continuing on the ground, the state attorney general's involvement, and residents' concerns about water Searchlight New Mexico.

Read together, the New Mexico record describes a site where every element of delivery is independently visible — the financing, the permits, the court, the pipeline, the work force — and where the pieces do not yet add up to the announced schedule. That is precisely why the 26 percent figure, Oracle's own, is the number to hold the company to.

Saline Township: verified construction, no delivered capacity

Saline Township, Michigan, sits at tier two: construction, permits and utility work are verifiable, but nothing has been delivered. The site — developed by Related Digital, with Oracle and OpenAI as the tenants named on the roster — has the most complete municipal record of the unfinished sites.

The township's own update page, maintained as a running public record, documents water, sanitary and stormwater work tied to the project, permits issued through the Michigan Department of Environment, Great Lakes, and Energy — including a site-specific dewatering authorization of up to 681 gallons per minute — and substation construction anticipated from mid-June 2026, with a wastewater-discharge permit hearing still pending Saline Township. This is the granular, unglamorous record that actual building produces: dewatering volumes, generator permits, substation schedules.

The physical progress matches the paperwork. MLive reported in September 2026 that two of the site's three 550,000-square-foot data-center buildings had been framed out and partially roofed, with workers having passed more than 1 million work hours on the project by the end of August MLive.

Framed buildings, issued permits and an anticipated substation are real, dated evidence of construction — and none of it is capacity. No record in this audit shows a Saline Township building energized and serving Oracle or OpenAI workloads. The distinction is not pedantic: it is the difference between a project that is spending and a project that is serving, and the whole point of tiering is to keep the two separate. The township page will be the place to watch for the wastewater decision and, eventually, the energization record that moves this site up a tier — or does not.

Port Washington: permitted, waiting on the grid

Port Washington, Wisconsin, is tier three: the permissions are real and dated, the grid connection is unresolved, and the build's visible progress rests on headline-level reports.

The state's record is concrete. The Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources issued wetland exemptions and stormwater coverage for the site on December 11, 2025, and a minor-source air permit — 25-MIN-094 — covering 45 diesel emergency generators on June 12, 2026; the state's materials also describe the campus sitting on 672 acres of Vantage Data Centers' 1,644-acre holding Wisconsin DNR. What the state record does not yet show is power: American Transmission Company's interconnection for the site remains under Public Service Commission review.

The vertical progress is visible only at headline level. Data Center Dynamics reported a second-building top-out at the Lighthouse campus — Vantage's development serving OpenAI — in June 2026 Data Center Dynamics. And in September 2026, the Ozaukee Press put a headline on community reaction, describing the project's size as "insane" Ozaukee Press.

The verification boundary is stated plainly: the campus's total capacity and its completion status could not be verified from readable records, so neither figure is stated here. What Port Washington demonstrates is a specific failure mode of roster-thinking: a site can hold dated state permits and a reported top-out and still be months away from the only milestone that matters — an energized interconnection. Permits are permission; interconnection is power. Until the Public Service Commission acts on the transmission request, the site's capacity is a plan.

Shackelford County: the roster-only case

Shackelford County, Texas, is the roster's quietest entry and its clearest lesson. The county appears on Oracle's January 2026 list — already linked above — and beyond the roster, this audit found exactly one additional record: a June 2026 report by The Texas Dispatch describing a planned data-center campus in the county tied to the Stargate program The Texas Dispatch.

That is the entire independent record. The report's specifics — the campus's scale, its power arrangement, its timeline and Oracle's contracted role — could not be verified against any independent permit, utility or county record surfaced by this audit. No second source, no dated energization milestone, no state permit decision.

Shackelford County is why the fourth tier exists. A community named in a corporate blog post is a real place where something may well get built; it is not a megawatt anyone can plan around. Until an independent record exists — a filed permit, an interconnection request, a county action — the county's place in the roster should be read as an intention, not an asset. Readers who see the county cited as part of Oracle's AI footprint should ask for the same documents this audit could not find.

What the gap means

Stack the five communities in one column and the finding is a gradient, not a binary. Abilene is confirmed operational, with dated power milestones and active phase-two construction. Project Jupiter is 26 percent complete by Oracle's own account, under a court-stayed permit process, with a reported force majeure notice against a 2028 target. Saline Township has two of three buildings framed and a municipal record that will show its next steps. Port Washington is permitted, with its interconnection still in review. Shackelford County is a name and a single unverifiable report.

That spread is the point. A vendor roster flattens five very different physical realities into one confident list; the site-level record restores the differences. And the differences are gradeable by anyone willing to read the same public materials this audit used — state permit databases, county update pages, court dockets, interconnection reviews and local reporting. None of this requires access to Oracle; all of it requires refusing to let the roster substitute for the record.

For buyers of cloud AI capacity, lenders underwriting the build-out and journalists covering it, the practical discipline is short: before treating an announced site as capacity, ask for the tier-one artifacts — an energization date from the utility or the contractor, a permit decision with a docket number, an interconnection approval. Where those exist, the claim is checkable. Where they do not, the announcement is still just an announcement.

BTW maintains a running directory entry for Oracle Cloud here, and this audit's per-site findings are recorded against it. The five communities will be re-graded as the dated milestones above resolve — and the roster, not the record, is what will need the explaining if they resolve slowly.