The AI power buildout has a hidden choke point: casting the blades inside gas turbines. Only four companies worldwide have mastered the process, and all of them are sold out, with GE Vernova booked through 2030 largely on data center demand.
Elon Musk says SpaceX will bypass that oligopoly. A foundry the company has been quietly building in Bastrop, Texas will cast turbine blades and vanes in-house, and Musk claims the move could bring new gas plants online up to 18 months sooner. He posted the confirmation on X after job listings and land records pointed to the facility’s purpose.
The engineering is unforgiving. Blades in the hottest section of a turbine run at 3,000 to 3,600 degrees Fahrenheit, about 800 degrees hotter than the melting point of the alloy they are made from, and each one has to be cast as a single crystal inside a vacuum furnace. Turbines remain necessary, Musk says, because solar cannot bootstrap the grid fast enough by itself, so Tesla and SpaceX are each building 100GW a year of solar capacity alongside them.
Faster turbines also mean faster pollution. The NAACP has accused SpaceXAI of running gas turbines in Memphis without the permits and controls federal law requires, and a Virginia study estimated that eight turbines at one data center facility could cause 3.4 to 6.5 premature deaths a year across several counties. Musk’s casting shortcut would put more of those turbines in the ground sooner.
