The Watch · Scenarios
The Future
One decision, two futures. On July 21 the county either gets its data center or it doesn’t — and the road forks here. Below, each side tells its story the way it sees it: first the version where things go their way, then the version where that same plan falls apart. Same years, same county, both sides taken seriously. Neither column is a prediction — both are built from things already on the record.
How to read this: every dated line below grows out of a real promise, filing, or court ruling — the small note beneath it (↳) tells you which one. The futures are our reading of where those facts could lead, not a prediction.
The permit clears. The fuel cells were the answer all along — 92% less smog-forming pollution than anything the critics compared us to. Construction speeds up the next morning.
↳ Extends Oracle’s Jul 2 letter and the filed application.
The first computers come online, on the schedule we signed. Four thousand construction workers on site; the parking lots fill at dawn.
↳ The county MOU’s own §2.2 milestone; jobs per the Jul 2 letter.
The first 400-acre phase and its microgrid — the campus’s own private power system — are finished. The yearly payments the company makes in place of property taxes clear every December: $12 million, on time. The schools cash theirs.
↳ County MOU §2.2, §3.6, and Table A-3.
750 jobs at $75–100k with benefits — kids who left for Austin come home. The $50M water fund builds the desalination pilot. Santa Teresa finally becomes what it was drawn up to be back in 1990.
↳ MOU §2.3, §3.3, §3.7; the 1990 diversification hope, per Haussamen.
The first hardware upgrade lands on schedule — new chips, new borrowing — and the campus stays state-of-the-art. The clock on HB93, the state’s clean-energy law, starts ticking, and clean power comes online on the timeline we always promised.
↳ The 4–5-refresh financing structure; HB93’s 2035–2045 path.
A power system that adds no carbon, because the law now requires it. Thirty years of payments: $360 million, paid in full. The bet the county made in one September afternoon looks, in hindsight, obvious.
↳ HB93’s 2045 requirement; the MOU’s 30-year totals.
The water math arrives first. The “drinking water” cap holds at 20,000 gallons a day — while the wells pull toward the million gallons the state’s own engineer calculated. The court’s water auditors start asking whose water that is.
↳ The OSE calculation; the SCOTUS consent decree.
Oracle’s mountain of debt starts to wobble — the bondholders’ lawsuit and a frozen $38-billion loan were the early warning signs. The upgrade cycle that justified $165 billion slips. Nobody announces it; the money simply stops arriving.
↳ The bondholder class action; the refresh-cycle financing logic.
The county tries to check the jobs and the water. It can’t — it couldn’t in year one either, when Jupiter was already out of compliance and the county attorney admitted “we just don’t have enough information.”
↳ The Jun 24 2026 non-compliance declaration; the attorney’s own words.
The HB93 break ends. New pollution-control costs land on aging fuel cells, and the tenant has cheaper options elsewhere. And the clause everyone forgot: on paper, the legal owner of the power plant is Doña Ana County.
↳ The HB93 sunset; the air applications’ ownership line.
Empty buildings in the desert, owned on paper by the county, with taxes waived until 2055 no matter what. The water right — half-drained for decades — never goes back to growing anything. The example spreads to the next county intact.
↳ The 30-year abatement; the IRB title structure.
The permit is denied — or trimmed until the numbers no longer work. The public comments did it: seven thousand voices, sixteen organizations, one journalist’s page count.
↳ The 7,000+ comments; the NMELC transparency letter.
The 2,400 acre-feet of water — about 780 million gallons a year — stay in the ground. New Mexico’s court-ordered water math gets easier, not harder. The emergency well stands as a monument to a process that finally said no.
↳ LRG-03150-E; the consent decree’s retirement mandate.
The lawsuits finish what they started: the records open, the closed-door meeting is ruled on, and the playbook — vote first, show the documents later — is broken in public.
↳ Judge DeLaney’s record order; the NMFOG and NMELC suits.
The county writes the rulebook it never had: disclosure requirements, water metering, guaranteed community benefits. The San Marcos lesson, brought home. The next company has to negotiate in the open.
↳ The San Marcos precedent; the county’s verification resolution.
Sunland Park’s arsenic problem finally moves to the front of the line — the political muscle once spent defending Jupiter gets spent fixing water people actually drink.
↳ “New Mexico’s own Flint,” per the local record.
The desert is still dark at night. That is either a victory or a failure, depending on which of these two columns you believe — which is the whole point of this page.
↳ The page’s own honesty rule.
The jobs never come. The commissioner who voted yes because people like him struggle to find work here watches his neighbors keep commuting to El Paso — now with nothing on the horizon.
↳ Commissioner Sanchez’s own reasoning, on the record.
$360 million in payments, $50 million for water, $1.2 million a year for Gadsden, Hatch, and Las Cruces schools — all gone. Nobody builds a desalination plant for a county that said no.
↳ The county MOU’s payment tables.
The money lands in Abilene and Shackelford instead — the pollution too, and the paychecks. The aquifer is still shared; El Paso pumps from it regardless.
↳ The Stargate fleet build-out; Meta’s 750,000 gal/day permit next door.
Santa Teresa’s industrial park keeps waiting, as it has since 1990. Oil and gas stay the state’s answer. “The county that killed the future” shows up in every developer’s pitch.
↳ The 1990 diversification hope; the state’s economic frame.
The watchdogs won the fight and lost the argument — because saying no without an economic answer is also a choice, and it also has a cost. This column has to say that too.
↳ The page’s own honesty rule.
What both futures share
- The aquifer is finite and shared across two states and two countries — built or not.
- A Supreme Court order binds New Mexico to stop pumping 18,200 acre-feet of groundwater a year — built or not.
- The people of Sunland Park deserve clean water — built or not. Theirs is the debt that predates Jupiter.
- Someone has to keep watch — built or not. That is what this site is for.
Let Project Jupiter be something that connects and unites this community.