Oracle trucks compressed natural gas to power AI data centers

Oracle has been trucking compressed natural gas to AI data centers that cannot yet connect to a pipeline, according to Bloomberg reporting cited by several outlets. The approach is meant to work around delays in pipeline infrastructure and keep construction and operations on schedule. It has already been used in Utah and Texas, and is being considered for a project in New Mexico.

The Next Web put the price at roughly four times the cost of gas at a hub, while IT之家 cited the same reporting as saying the full process costs about 4x that of delivery through a major pipeline hub. Details differ slightly across accounts, but the cost premium is consistent.

On implementation, IT之家 said the method has been used for more than a year at a Utah data center and has been brought to the Shackelford data center in Texas being built for OpenAI, with a possible extension to the large Project Jupiter site in New Mexico. 华尔街见闻, citing the reporting, said the trucked-gas service at the Salt Lake City-area project is provided by Certarus, a unit of Superior Plus. Certarus said timelines for connecting data centers to pipelines and the grid keep lengthening, creating growing demand for energy solutions that can be deployed quickly and scaled flexibly.

Capacity is limited. IT之家 described the process as involving extraction, compression, transport, decompression and release, and said a single large trailer carries only enough gas to run a 100MW data center for 40 minutes. 华尔街见闻 noted that Oracle's free cash flow is currently negative and is expected to stay under pressure until more AI data centers are completed and brought online.

Markets reacted. 华尔街见闻 reported that Oracle shares fell 5.5% on Thursday to $135.69, the largest single-day drop since July 16, while Bloom Energy, which has a fuel-cell energy partnership with Oracle, fell more than 6% the same day. The Next Web added that Europe faces the same grid bottleneck but is responding in the opposite direction, with Spain proposing to refuse grid connections to any data center not running on 80% renewables. The story currently rests here: trucked gas is in use in multiple locations and may expand, while cost and scaling constraints remain open concerns.