Cloud computing giant Oracle has maintained operations at its Salt Lake City data center by trucking in compressed natural gas as a workaround to pipeline delays.

According to reports from Bloomberg, the company has relied on trucked gas for more than a year as it waits to be connected to a gas pipeline, which is expected to support operations in the long term.

According to the report, which cited unnamed sources, Oracle has also used truck deliveries for its under-construction campus in Shackelford County, Texas, being developed in conjunction with OpenAI.

Reports suggest the company is now considering the same model for its stalled Project Jupiter data center in New Mexico, where regulators have blocked the extension of a natural gas pipeline that was expected to feed Bloom Energy fuel cells at the site.

Trucked gas would allow the company to bring the early stages of the data center online prior to the pipeline's completion.

In July, the New Mexico state land office rejected midstream natural gas firm Energy Transfer’s application to build a new natural gas pipeline to feed the site.

The 17-mile pipeline extension, dubbed the Green Chile Project, was expected to deliver up to 400 million cubic feet of natural gas per day to power 2.5GW of Bloom fuel cells deployed on site.

State officials posited large-scale water use, increased CO2 emissions, and a lack of state revenue generation as major factors in their decision. Despite the setback, at the time Oracle claimed that the project still remained on schedule.

However, in September, Oracle sent a ‘force majeure’ notice to Blue Owl Capital in an effort to shield itself from potential increased costs associated with the project.

Should the 2.5GW data center campus, dubbed Project Jupiter, fail to come online in 2028 as planned, the cloud giant is seeking to delay the payments it would have to make, rather than forfeit its tenancy, the report added.