Oracle's data center construction crisis continues to spread. Following the force majeure declaration for the Jupiter project in New Mexico, the 1.3GW hyperscale data center "Project Lighthouse" in Wisconsin is once again in jeopardy — not because of site selection or funding, but because power cannot be connected.

According to the latest report from data center research firm Aterio, the transmission approval process for the Lighthouse project has been sent back to square one by the Wisconsin Public Service Commission (PSC), and the statutory review clock has been reset to zero. This means Oracle's previously promised "delivery to customers in the second half of 2027" is highly unlikely to be fulfilled. Under the base case scenario, full-power supply will be delayed to October 2028, and under the pessimistic scenario, it will be pushed to spring 2029. Affected by this news, Oracle's stock price fell 1.8% that day, and the company has not made any public response.

This is the second project among Oracle's five core data center campuses to be explicitly flagged as having delay risk. Just two weeks ago, Barclays credit strategist Andrew Keches told clients that the New Mexico issue "has no contagion effect on other projects" — and reality is disproving this judgment one by one.

Approval Restart: Over 500 Documents, Reset to Zero

The Lighthouse project is located in Port Washington, Wisconsin, developed by Vantage Data Centers, with Oracle as the tenant. It is part of the OpenAI Stargate construction plan, with a total power demand of 1.3GW and critical IT load of approximately 902MW.

The project's power bottleneck lies in the fact that the campus power supply depends on American Transmission Company (ATC) building a new high-voltage transmission line, and ATC must obtain PSC approval before construction can begin.

The procedure had originally advanced to a critical point. ATC's application was deemed a "complete application" in December 2025, but since then the company has successively supplemented or resubmitted 564 documents, adding new line plans and temporary bypass lines. On August 7 of this year, the PSC commissioners unanimously revoked the previous "completeness determination" — reportedly the first time in the commission's decades-long history, and possibly the first time ever.

PSC Chair Summer Strand stated that "the scale and number of changes to the application... created obstacles for the participation of all parties and the public." Commissioner Marcus Hawkins put it more bluntly: "We have a strict timetable, but the premise is that the application must be complete."

The administrative law judge subsequently found that ATC failed to comply with the order regarding specified changes, and the PSC closed the case on September 10 without ruling on the substance. ATC refiled its application on September 18, and the statutory review clock restarted from zero.

ATC originally planned to begin construction in December 2026 and complete it by the end of 2027, aligning with Oracle's delivery timeline. That plan has now officially failed.

Timeline: 2028 at the Earliest, More Likely 2029

According to Wisconsin law, the PSC must rule on the completeness of the application within 30 days (the next deadline is October 19), followed by 180 days to make a substantive decision, which can be extended by another 180 days, after which construction can only begin with 6 months' advance notice.

Based on this, Aterio has calculated three scenarios:

Optimistic scenario (low probability): partial power supply achieved in October 2027, full 1.3GW power supply achieved in August 2028;

Base scenario: partial power supply achieved in December 2027, full power supply achieved in October 2028, with effective load ramp-up beginning in the first quarter of 2028;

Extended scenario: partial power supply achieved in June 2028, full power supply achieved in April 2029.

Aterio pointed out that, based on historical records, the PSC has initiated extended reviews in all comparable large-scale transmission cases it has examined. For 345kV projects, the actual time from completeness determination to decision was 355 to 358 days, rather than the theoretical 180 days. In other words, the extended scenario is the one with historical precedent.

Aterio's head of data center research, Javier Reyes, said, "Construction at Port Washington is progressing steadily, but power delivery depends on a regulatory process that has already been restarted." Currently, two buildings in the campus have been topped out, but without grid connection, the chips inside will have nowhere to plug in.

The Bill: Costs Have Jumped 75%, Debt Pressure Continues to Accumulate

Beyond the timeline, project costs have also expanded significantly. ATC's resubmitted "Ozaukee County Distribution Interconnection Project" estimated cost has risen to $2.48 billion to $2.72 billion, an increase of about 75% from the original application of $1.3 billion to $1.7 billion, and could become the most expensive single transmission project in Wisconsin's history. About $1.1 billion of that is for the Decker grid stability system (E-STATCOM), and Oracle has committed to bearing this portion of the cost.

Tom Content of the Citizens Utility Board cited data pointing out that Wisconsin's current largest electricity customer uses less than 100 megawatts, while the campus's peak electricity consumption could reach as high as 3,500 megawatts.

Pressure at the financing level also cannot be ignored. According to Barclays data, the construction funding for the Wisconsin campus comes from $15 billion of Vantage's $38 billion loan package, which reportedly faces difficulties in syndicated sales. In addition, because Wisconsin's large electricity customer tariff requires the applicant's credit rating to be no lower than A-, while Oracle's current rating is BBB-, the company will face margin call pressure — Oracle itself disclosed that related letter of credit guarantee requirements could exceed $100 million per year, with total guarantee amounts reportedly exceeding $7 billion. And all of this points to a campus where full-power supply may not be realized until 2029.

Goldman Sachs TMT analyst Sean Johnstone warned in a research note the day after the New Mexico force majeure declaration that "permitting approvals, power plan redesigns, community opposition, and local infrastructure constraints are threatening construction timelines and financing assumptions." In Wisconsin's case, just one of these alone has already caused a substantial impact.

The Cost of Delay: Nearly 100 Billion Yuan in Monthly Revenue Deferred

Goldman Sachs equity research estimates that hyperscale cloud service providers need about $11.6 billion in AI revenue per GW of computing power per year to achieve a 15% return on investment on AI computing spending in 2026 to 2027. Based on Lighthouse's approximately 0.9GW of IT capacity, each month of delay corresponds to about $850 million to $900 million in deferred revenue. Bloom Energy stated on its second-quarter earnings call that for a 1GW data center, bringing power online one month earlier can generate about $1 billion to $2 billion in revenue value.

At the same time, capital expenditure pressure does not ease because of the delay. The "must perform no matter what" lease Oracle previously signed for the Jupiter project means that even if the campus does not come online, the company must still bear holding costs. Barclays pointed out that hardware capital expenditure is typically spent 2 to 3 months before assets come online; what is delayed is revenue, not cost. Oracle's FY27 capital expenditure guidance is as high as up to $95 billion, far exceeding FY26's $55.7 billion, further compressing financial flexibility.

This dilemma is not unique to Oracle. According to Goldman Sachs' latest "Carbon Economics" report, the scale of new high-voltage transmission lines in the United States has shrunk dramatically from an annual average of 1,700 miles between 2010 and 2014 to 350 miles between 2020 and 2023, and the median time from grid connection application to commercial operation is now close to 5 years. Engine manufacturer INNIO told Goldman Sachs that the grid connection cycle has extended from about 2 years historically to more than 7 years today.

Port Washington is a real-world microcosm of this statistic: 1.3GW of electricity demand, waiting for new high-voltage lines, up to five new substations, and a regulator that has already lost patience. This is also the backdrop for Goldman Sachs' forecast that by 2030, 28% of U.S. data center electricity demand will be supplied by behind-the-meter natural gas and fuel cells — while in 2025 that proportion is "effectively zero."

Crisis Contagion: From "Isolated Incident" to Systemic Concern

Barclays' Andrew Keches asserted in a flash note after the New Mexico project declared force majeure: "The headline is big, but the actual impact is small... There is no contagion to other projects, and credit should not fluctuate because of this."

However, the fact is that Oracle's credit default swaps (CDS) soared to a record 237 basis points the next day, and the "no contagion" judgment has become increasingly fragile with the exposure of the Wisconsin project.

It is worth noting that the reasons for delays across Oracle's projects vary: New Mexico is mired in pipeline and air permit issues, while Wisconsin is blocked by grid regulatory approval. As Aterio pointed out, when each project has its own "unique reason for delay," the defense logic of "isolation" no longer holds.

The Saline project in Michigan, which Barclays considers relatively safe, is said to have secured power supply and permits and is "one of the most de-risked assets in Oracle's pipeline," with first-phase delivery expected by the end of the year, less than three months away. As the original text says, historical experience shows that the next one to run into trouble is often the one considered safest.

As Goldman Sachs' Johnstone put it, "For lenders and data center investors, this is a reminder — third-party developed AI infrastructure is not always as stable and reliable as it appears." The construction wave supported by tens of billions of dollars in debt has as its logical premise that assets come online on schedule. The reality is that they have not come online on schedule.