Musk Responds to The Information’s Report About SpaceX Setting Up a Turbine Blade Factory

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk on Saturday responded to The Information’s report that his company was laying the groundwork for a foundry to build turbine vanes and blades to avoid a power shortage for AI data centers.

“By doing in-house casting [of vanes and blades] at SpaceX, we can accelerate nat gas turbines coming online by up to 18 months, which is a profound game-changer,” Musk said on X, in response to the The Information’s report.

The foundry move is classic Musk, seeking to do an end-run around an existing oligopoly of incumbents in the field. He said the move was critical because, as his company’s chatbot Grok estimated, 15 gigawatts of AI chips produced next year won’t be turned on because of power and other equipment shortages. Chips that consume that level of energy are worth hundreds of billions of dollars.

The Information reported two weeks ago that data center developers that work with Google, Microsoft, Oracle and others fear that AI chips won’t have a place to plug in because of power delays, political fights and other technical challenges facing new facilities.