SpaceX · Elon Musk · Tesla · Amazon · TechCrunch AI
Musk’s faster path to more gas turbines comes with pollution problem
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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.
Key facts
- The International Energy Agency projects global data center electricity use will roughly double by 2030, and gas turbine maker GE Vernova says it’s sold out of production capacity through 2030 due
- As for the casting bottleneck specifically, 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
- In Virginia’s “Data Center Alley,” a study commissioned by the Piedmont Environmental Council used the EPA’s own COBRA health-impact model to assess a single facility’s eight full-time gas turbines
- In Memphis, where SpaceXAI has run gas turbines to power its Colossus data centers since 2024, the NAACP has repeatedly accused the company of operating turbines without the permits or pollution
Summary
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. “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 “why” of all this goes back to one of the biggest challenges facing the AI industry right now. 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.