Some of the AI industry's biggest data center builders have run out of patience waiting for the power grid. Unable to secure new electricity hookups fast enough to match the pace of their buildouts, companies including Elon Musk's xAI and the startup Crusoe are turning to a stopgap borrowed from aviation: retired jet engines, mounted on trailers and converted into power plants.
xAI has installed eight converted jet-engine turbines in Mississippi to help power its Colossus 2 data center across the border in Memphis, according to the New York Times, which cited state permits and satellite imagery. Crusoe, which is building the Abilene, Texas campus for OpenAI's Stargate project, ordered 13 converted units in April from ProEnergy, a company that rebuilds General Electric jet engines commonly found on Boeing aircraft into stationary generators.
Why engines, and why now
The appeal is speed. A new 100-megawatt grid connection in Northern Virginia, one of the world's densest data-center markets, now takes about seven years to secure, according to the International Energy Agency. A jet-engine power setup, by contrast, can have a data center running within 24 months, said Audun Martinsen, an analyst at Rystad Energy. "It's all about getting power as fast as possible," he said.
Mitsubishi Power, a major turbine manufacturer, told Bloomberg that most new power capacity on order won't arrive until 2031 given backlogs across the industry. The supply crunch has already claimed one high-profile casualty: in September, Crusoe walked away from a $1.25 billion deal to buy 29 natural-gas turbines from Boom Supersonic — the supersonic-jet maker that has repurposed its own engine technology into a data-center power product — though a Crusoe spokesperson said the company still plans to use turbines from other suppliers.
The workaround isn't free of tradeoffs. Converted jet engines are less fuel-efficient and pollute more per megawatt than purpose-built gas turbines, the Times reported, meaning operators need more units to generate the same output. The Trump administration has encouraged data centers to generate their own power rather than wait on utilities, but some energy analysts expect environmental and permitting pressure on these setups to intensify within the next year or two.
Microsoft, for its part, pulled out as anchor tenant for a data center project in Loughton, England, after the local utility said it couldn't guarantee sufficient power until the early-to-mid 2030s — a sign that even the largest cloud providers are reshaping their plans around the same grid bottleneck now pushing smaller builders toward jet engines.
