Oracle spent $3.4 million on ads asking New Mexico to approve its data center's air permit

New Mexico regulators are deciding whether to let Oracle’s data center run a natural-gas fuel cell system projected to pollute more than Albuquerque and Las Cruces combined. Before they decide, Oracle spent $3,444,500 trying to make sure New Mexicans told them yes.

That is what the New Mexico State Ethics Commission found when it looked into an advertising blitz for Project Jupiter, the Oracle and OpenAI data center campus going up on about 1,400 acres in Doña Ana County. The commission said Oracle’s campaign is likely the largest lobbying advertising campaign ever disclosed in New Mexico, the biggest since the state started tracking them in 2021.

Oracle paid for a website, projectjupitertogether.com, with a fillable form that let visitors submit supportive comments straight to the New Mexico Environment Department. It also bought television and radio ads, ran digital ads on social media, sent paid canvassers with tablets door to door asking for supportive comments, and paid New Mexico TikTok and Instagram influencers to post about the project, all of it steering people to the same website.

New Mexico’s Lobbyist Regulation Act requires anyone spending money to influence a government decision like this one to register and disclose it. Oracle hadn’t, until the ethics commission investigated and asked the company to come into voluntary compliance, the step state law requires before the commission can sue. Oracle agreed. Every dollar went to one firm, Brabender Cox, a national consulting firm that has done work for Republicans including former Vice President Mike Pence and former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani.

The second campaign for this permit already got sued

Oracle’s is not the only big-money push built around this one permit. Earlier this year, an anonymous group called Elevate New Mexico blanketed mailboxes and social feeds with ads asking New Mexicans to back Project Jupiter. It never said who was paying for it. The ethics commission sued Elevate in April, accusing it of lobbying the Environment Department to approve the project’s gas plants without registering as the law requires. Deputy Director Amelia Bierle said at the time that out-of-state corporations “do not get to operate in the shadows” when trying to sway New Mexico officials.

Elevate settled in August. The commission’s filings showed it had received nearly $3.7 million from Yucca Growth Infrastructure, Project Jupiter’s developer itself, and reported spending just over $419,000 of it on ads. Between the two campaigns, more than $7 million has now been spent or committed to shaping public opinion on one air permit.

The permit hearing has already stalled twice

Yucca Growth Infrastructure needs the Environment Department’s sign-off on a natural-gas fuel cell system to power Project Jupiter. The permit, if approved, would let the project emit more greenhouse gases a year than Albuquerque and Las Cruces combined. Department spokesperson Drew Goretzka has said NMED must decide by Nov. 23.

Getting there has not gone smoothly. The hearing was originally set for Oct. 19, then moved earlier, to a Monday in September. Before that Monday arrived, the New Mexico Supreme Court froze the whole proceeding while it weighed challenges from two environmental groups. On Sept. 17, the court unanimously rejected those challenges and let the case resume. The hearing officer who had been running the case had already recused himself in August. On Oct. 2, Environment Secretary James Kenney named retired federal judge James Browning to take his place. No opening date for the hearing has been announced.

New Energy Economy, one of the groups that sued, said it went to the state’s highest court because it believed the process was “stacked against meaningful public participation,” in the words of its executive director, Mariel Nanasi. That is the same public process Oracle’s ad campaign was built to influence, with a pre-written comment form and paid canvassers asking people to tell regulators what to decide.

Oracle’s answer

Oracle, through spokesperson Michael Egbert, said it worked cooperatively with the commission and disclosed the campaign “in an abundance of caution,” calling itself a “responsible developer” making “a conscious effort to listen directly to the community.” The company says Project Jupiter is a “generational investment” it expects to bring New Mexico $4.7 billion in economic benefits, 7,000 construction jobs and 1,500 ongoing jobs, figures that are Oracle’s own and have not been independently verified.

The case has a new hearing officer now, but still no hearing date, so there is no telling yet when New Mexico decides whether Project Jupiter’s power system gets to run.