Musk says SpaceX will cast its own gas turbine blades to speed up AI power buildout

Elon Musk confirmed on Saturday that a secretive facility SpaceX has been building in Bastrop, Texas, is a foundry meant to cast the blades and vanes used inside gas turbines. The announcement followed a report from The Information, which cited job listings referencing a 'blades and vanes foundry' and findings from analyst Corey Trinetti showing SpaceX had acquired roughly 830 acres near its existing Starlink factory in Bastrop between March and June.

Writing on X, Musk said SpaceX and Tesla are each racing to build 100GW of solar production capacity a year, but natural gas will still be needed for several years to supplement and bootstrap solar power. He identified blade and vane casting as the key bottleneck in turbine production, and said doing that casting in-house could accelerate turbine deployment by up to 18 months.

Why it matters

The AI industry is currently constrained by two major factors: GPU shortages and limited power grid capacity. The International Energy Agency projects global data center electricity demand will roughly double by 2030, while turbine maker GE Vernova says its production capacity is essentially sold out through 2030. That's pushed hyperscalers including Amazon, Google, Meta, OpenAI, and Microsoft to build private gas-fired plants next to their data centers rather than wait on the grid.

Casting turbine blades is notoriously difficult: they operate at temperatures hotter than the melting point of their own alloy, made possible only through internal cooling channels and precise casting as a single unbroken crystal grown in a vacuum furnace. Only four companies worldwide currently master this process at industrial scale, and all are at capacity.

The pollution concern

If SpaceX succeeds, it would give a Musk-controlled company a manufacturing capability that other AI infrastructure builders currently depend on a small oligopoly for. But it would also mean more turbines coming online faster, adding to existing pollution concerns. In Memphis, where SpaceXAI has run gas turbines for its Colossus data centers since 2024, the NAACP has repeatedly accused the company of operating without required permits or pollution controls. A separate study in Virginia's data center corridor estimated that emissions from just one facility's eight turbines could affect more than 2.5 million people and cause 3.4 to 6.5 additional premature deaths annually.