Musk’s faster path to more gas turbines comes with pollution problem

Elon Musk says he’s found a way to solve one of AI’s biggest bottlenecks by making a hard-to-manufacture turbine part himself.

On Saturday, Musk confirmed what a secret foundry SpaceX has been building in Bastrop, Texas, is for — an apparent response to a story that was already closing in on the details. Earlier in the day, The Information published a report citing job listings that explicitly mention a “blades and vanes foundry,” plus findings from Corey Trinetti, a due diligence specialist who authors detailed reviews of AI infrastructure sites in his newsletter and who’d reported that SpaceX had bought roughly 830 acres near its existing Starlink factory in Bastrop between March and June.

“SpaceX and Tesla are each building 100GW/year of solar production capacity as fast as possible,” Musk wrote on X on Saturday, “but natural gas will still be needed to supplement and bootstrap solar for several years. The limiting factor for nat gas turbine production is casting the blades & vanes. By doing in-house casting at SpaceX, we can accelerate nat gas turbines coming online by up to 18 months, which is a profound game-changer.”

The “why” of all this goes back to one of the biggest challenges facing the AI industry right now. GPU shortages are still an issue — Nvidia’s newest Blackwell chips are still running lead times of several months, for example — but a second constraint has emerged alongside it, which is the physical power grid. The International Energy Agency projects global data center electricity use will roughly double by 2030, and gas turbine maker GE Vernova says it’s essentially sold out of production capacity through 2030 due largely to AI infrastructure demand.

That shortage is why building private gas-fired plants next to data centers, instead of waiting on the grid, has become a ubiquitous strategy for so-called hyperscalers, including Amazon , Google , Meta , OpenAI , and Microsoft . After years of prioritizing wind and solar, they’re all now betting on natural gas to get data centers online faster.

As for the casting bottleneck specifically, according to The Information, the blades inside a gas turbine’s hottest section run at temperatures around 3,000 to 3,600 degrees Fahrenheit, which is roughly 800 degrees hotter than the melting point of the very metal alloy they’re made from. That’s only possible because of the blades’ internal cooling channels and thermal-barrier coatings, plus the specific way each blade is cast . Just four companies worldwide have mastered the casting process well enough to produce them at industrial scale, and all of them are tapped out right now.