Elon Musk says SpaceX will begin casting its own gas turbine blades in-house, a move he claims could speed up the deployment of natural gas power plants for AI data centers by up to 18 months. Writing on X on Saturday, Musk said gas will remain necessary to supplement and bootstrap solar power for several years, even as SpaceX and Tesla build 100 gigawatts per year of solar production capacity. He identified the casting of blades and vanes as the limiting factor in turbine production and said doing that work internally at SpaceX could accelerate the timeline significantly.
The announcement comes as demand for electricity from data centers strains the U.S. power grid. The International Energy Agency projects global data center electricity use will roughly double by 2030, and turbine maker GE Vernova says it is essentially sold out of production capacity through that year, largely due to AI infrastructure demand. That shortage has pushed hyperscalers including Amazon, Google, Meta, OpenAI, and Microsoft to build private gas-fired plants next to data centers rather than wait for grid connections, a strategy that has become widespread across the industry.
The casting bottleneck is severe because turbine blades operate in extreme conditions. According to The Information, blades in the hottest section of a gas turbine run at temperatures around 3,000 to 3,600 degrees Fahrenheit, roughly 800 degrees hotter than the melting point of the metal alloy they are made from. The blades survive only because of internal cooling channels, thermal-barrier coatings, and a precise casting process that requires each blade to be grown as a single, unbroken crystal inside a vacuum furnace, with no microscopic seams. Just four companies worldwide have mastered this process at industrial scale, and all are currently tapped out.
The difficulty is compounded by blade size. The same crystal-growing process is tricky even for smaller jet engine blades, but power-plant turbine blades are considerably larger, making defect-free production at scale much harder. If SpaceX succeeds, a Musk-controlled entity would hold a manufacturing capability that competitors currently depend on a tiny oligopoly for, giving SpaceXAI an edge that well-funded rivals without manufacturing expertise would struggle to match quickly.
But faster turbine deployment brings a pollution problem, and gas turbines already in operation are drawing legal and health-related scrutiny. 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 without the permits or pollution controls required by federal law. The turbines emit smog-forming compounds and hazardous chemicals like formaldehyde, pollutants linked to asthma, respiratory disease, and certain cancers, and the site sits near neighborhoods already burdened by heavy industrial pollution. University of Memphis researchers said their own limited analysis found air pollution grew slightly worse because of the data center.
The same fight is playing out elsewhere. In Virginia鈥檚 Data Center Alley, a study commissioned by the Piedmont Environmental Council used the EPA鈥檚 COBRA health-impact model to assess a single facility running eight full-time gas turbines. The study found emissions could reach more than 2.5 million people across multiple counties, with the heaviest impact falling on already-marginalized communities, and estimated 3.4 to 6.5 additional premature deaths per year, translating to $53 million to $99 million in annual health-related damages.
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