Is Oracle’s Force Majeure Notice a Canary in the Coal Mine?

On the Sept. 28, 2026, episode of The Morning Filter podcast, hosts Susan Dziubinski and Morningstar Chief US Market Strategist Dave Sekera discuss what Oracle’s ORCL issuance of a force majeure notice could signal about the future AI buildout boom. Here is an excerpt from the show.

Is Oracle’s Force Majeure Notice an Early Warning Sign for Data Center Development?

Susan Dziubinski: All right. What else stood out to you in last week’s market activity?

David Sekera: Yeah, we had the big meetings in Washington between China and the US. As far as I know—and correct me if I’m wrong—I didn’t see anything of any real interest, no new news coming out of the meetings with Xi from China. There are a lot of conflicting headlines surrounding what we may or may not be negotiating with Iran. So, you saw oil prices whipping around a bit. I think they’re anywhere from like $88 to maybe $96 a barrel.

But really, I think the most interesting news out there, which might’ve been below the headlines that most people would notice, was that Oracle ORCL issued a force majeure notice for construction of its largest data center, which is currently in construction, I believe, in New Mexico. So, what does that mean? A force majeure is a clause in a contract that allows one party to essentially state that forces beyond their control may be causing delays in the buildout of a data center. And this is really going to be used to try and protect themselves against maybe any contractual penalties that they would have to pay if they are late in being able to deliver the data center that they’re currently building.

Now, typically a force majeure is an event where it’s going to be like war, terrorism, natural disasters, public health emergencies, things like that, not necessarily just permitting delays, which is what Oracle noted in their force majeure at this point: They’re not able to get some of the permits that they need in as timely of a manner as they thought they were going to get. Now, they still also announced, even with that force majeure notice, that they still expect to be able to finish that data center on time. That tells me there must be enough slippage going on that the lawyers are kind of twisting their arms to tell them to make this declaration, but there’s also still enough time, enough buffer room that was built into the contract, that if all the stars line up, they should still be able to get it done on time.

Why is this of interest? I mean, for now it does appear to be only an issue with Oracle, but of course, is this a red flag? Is this just a canary in the coal mine? Is this going to be emblematic of a lot of other data centers maybe having similar permitting issues as well? And of course, if that’s true and too many data centers are delayed, then that of course would then lead to a big slowdown in the amount of tech hardware and everything else needed for the data centers, which could reverberate throughout the entire economic value chain for the AI buildout boom.

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