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

Elon Musk says a secretive new SpaceX foundry will let him cast his own turbine blades and get gas power online 18 months faster than anyone else — but it's a bet on a fuel source that's already triggering lawsuits and health studies everywhere his (and others') turbines have gone in. Musk’s faster path to more gas turbines comes with pollution problem. 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 big deal.” 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 an ubiquitous strategy for so-called hyperscalers, including Amazon, Google, Meta, OpenAI, and Microsoft.

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