Elon Musk says he has found a way to solve one of AI’s biggest bottlenecks by making difficult-to-manufacture turbine parts himself.
On Saturday, Musk confirmed what the secret foundry SpaceX is building in Bastrop, Texas, is for — an apparent response to a story that is already being detailed. Earlier in the day, The Information published a job posting that explicitly mentioned “blade and vane foundry” and a report citing the findings of Corey Trinetti, a due diligence expert who wrote an in-depth review of the AI Infrastructure site in his newsletter and reported that SpaceX purchased about 830 acres near the existing Starlink factory in Bastrop between March and June.
“SpaceX and Tesla are each building 100 gigawatts of solar capacity per year as quickly as possible,” Musk wrote in X on Saturday, “but natural gas will still be needed to supplement and bootstrap solar for several years. The limiting factor in natural gas turbine production is the casting of blades and vanes. By doing the in-house casting at SpaceX, we can accelerate the operation of natural gas turbines by up to 18 months, which is a game-changer.”
The “why” of all this goes back to one of the biggest challenges currently facing the AI industry. GPU shortages remain a problem, and lead times for Nvidia’s latest Blackwell chips, for example, are still months away. However, there is a second limitation that comes along with it. It’s the physical power grid. The International Energy Agency predicts that electricity use in global data centers will nearly double by 2030, and gas turbine maker GE Vernova says it will essentially run out of production capacity by 2030, largely due to demand for AI infrastructure.
This scarcity is why building private gas-fired power plants next to data centers, rather than waiting for the power grid, has become a universal strategy for so-called hyperscalers such as Amazon, Google, Meta, OpenAI, and Microsoft. After years of prioritizing wind and solar, the company is now betting on natural gas to bring data centers online faster.
Especially when it comes to casting bottlenecks, the blades in the hottest section of a gas turbine operate at temperatures around 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit to 3,600 degrees Fahrenheit, according to The Information. This is about 800 degrees higher than the melting point of the metal alloy it is made from. This is only possible due to the blade’s internal cooling channels and thermal barrier coating, as well as the special casting method of each blade. Only four companies worldwide have mastered the foundry process well enough to produce it on an industrial scale, and all of them are currently in operation.
What makes the whole thing particularly difficult is that each blade must be cast as a single, unbreakable crystal grown slowly in a vacuum furnace. There are no microscopic seams that would cause normal cast metal to crack under stress. Even with the small blades used in jet engines, this is a difficult process. The blades of power plant turbines are quite large, making it even more difficult to manufacture defect-free turbines at that scale.
If SpaceX pulls this off, which is easier said than done, of course, it would mean that the Musk-controlled company retains the manufacturing capacity that other AI infrastructure builders currently rely on in small oligopolies, giving SpaceXAI an advantage that would be difficult for deep-pocketed but non-manufacturing competitors to imitate quickly.
But it also means more gas turbines come online quickly, and underground turbines have already sparked federal lawsuits and peer-reviewed health studies over the pollution they emit.
In Memphis, SpaceXAI has been running gas turbines to power its Colossus data center since 2024, but the NAACP has repeatedly accused the company of operating the turbines without federal permits or pollution controls. The group’s concern is that such turbines emit harmful chemicals such as smog-forming compounds and formaldehyde, a pollutant linked to asthma, respiratory diseases and certain cancers. (The site is near an area that already faces heavy industrial pollution, and University of Memphis researchers said in an admittedly limited analysis that the data center caused air pollution to be “slightly worse.”)
But Memphis just happens to be the most prominent case. The same battle is being fought everywhere gas turbines are deployed as the default solution to data center power shortages. In Virginia’s “Data Center Array,” a study commissioned by the Piedmont Environmental Council using EPA’s proprietary COBRA health effects model found that emissions from a single facility’s eight commercial gas turbines could reach more than 2.5 million people in multiple counties, with the most severe impacts reaching already marginalized communities and potentially causing an estimated 3.4 to 6.5 premature deaths per year, equivalent to $53. Annual health-related losses range from millions of dollars to as much as $99 million.
The list and complaints go on.
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