Oracle is currently utilizing trucks to transport natural gas to its data centers as a temporary measure. This strategy allows the company to power its facilities while waiting for the completion of permanent gas pipeline infrastructure, thereby accelerating the deployment of computing capacity.
The company has already implemented this logistics solution at a data center in Utah for over a year. Furthermore, the approach is being applied at the Shackelford facility in Texas, which is being developed for OpenAI, and may be extended to the Project Jupiter site in New Mexico.
The process of transporting gas via trucks involves compression, transport, and decompression, which significantly increases expenses. According to reports, the total cost of this method is approximately four times higher than delivering gas through large-scale pipeline networks.
The capacity of this transport method remains limited in terms of volume. A single heavy-duty trailer carries enough natural gas to support the operations of a 100MW data center for only 40 minutes, highlighting the logistical challenges of relying on road transport for energy needs.
