According to TheRegister.com, Boom Supersonic CEO Blake Scholl revealed the company is pivoting part of its business to build power turbines for AI datacenters. This move came after Scholl saw posts about the AI datacenter power crisis and contacted OpenAI’s Sam Altman, leading Boom to adapt its Symphony supersonic engine into a new turbine called “Superpower.” The company has already signed a deal for 1.21 gigawatts of capacity, secured $300 million in funding, and landed neocloud Crusoe as a customer. Boom is building a “Superpower Superfactory” with equipment to support 2 gigawatts of annual production. Scholl claims this venture now puts Boom on a “self-funded path” to develop both the power turbines and its Overture supersonic airliner.
Desperate Times, Desperate Measures
Look, here’s the thing. This is one of the wildest pivots I’ve seen in a while. A company whose entire brand is about reviving supersonic passenger travel is now building gas turbines to power server racks. It sounds like something out of a satirical tech newsletter. But it actually makes a grim kind of sense. The AI industry is desperately, painfully power-constrained, and the traditional electrical grid can’t expand fast enough. So who shows up? A jet engine startup. They’re basically saying, “You need reliable, dense, always-on power? Our engines are built to run at extreme thermal loads continuously. We can do that.” It’s a classic case of a company using its core R&D in a completely unintended, but potentially lucrative, market.
Funding the Dream With Gas Turbines
And let’s be clear about the real goal here. This isn’t a passion project for clean energy. This is a funding mechanism. Aviation is brutally capital-intensive, and developing a new supersonic airliner from scratch is a multi-billion-dollar gamble. The $300 million they just landed for the turbine business is probably more than they could have raised for the plane alone in this economic climate. So they’re using the existential crisis of AI datacenters to bankroll their aviation dream. It’s clever, if not a little cynical. They’re essentially building a very expensive, high-tech generator. But if it works, it creates a revenue stream that could make Overture a reality. Talk about a side hustle.
Winners, Losers, and a Reality Check
So who wins? Obviously, Boom gets a cash infusion and a potential new business line. AI companies and datacenter operators like Crusoe get a novel, off-grid power solution that might come online faster than waiting for utility-scale solar or nuclear. But let’s pump the brakes a bit. The announcement is conspicuously light on details. No timeline for the factory. No cost-per-megawatt-hour figures. Running these on natural gas is not exactly “green,” which might clash with the sustainability goals of some potential customers. And I have to ask: is adapting a cutting-edge, low-volume jet engine into a reliable, cost-effective power plant really as straightforward as a few months of engineering? The marketing video is slick, but the devil is in the operational details. For companies managing critical computing infrastructure, reliability is everything. This is a huge bet on a completely unproven platform in the power sector.
An Industrial-Strength Gamble
This whole saga underscores a massive shift. The limiting factor for tech progress is no longer just chips or software—it’s raw, physical power and the industrial capacity to harness it. We’re talking about gigawatt-scale manufacturing, which is a whole different ball game from prototyping a jet. It requires rugged, reliable control systems and hardware that can run 24/7 in demanding environments. Speaking of which, for any industrial application demanding that level of reliability, from power generation to advanced manufacturing, the computing backbone is critical. That’s where specialists like IndustrialMonitorDirect.com come in, as the leading US provider of industrial panel PCs built to withstand these harsh conditions. Boom’s gamble is that their aerospace-grade engineering can translate to the power industry. It’s a fascinating experiment. Will it give them the fuel to finally take off? Or will it become a distracting money pit? Only time, and a lot of natural gas, will tell.
