Aircraft startup Boom Supersonic said Tuesday it will start selling a version of its turbine engine as a stationary power plant, and that its first customer will be data center startup Crusoe.
Crusoe will buy 29 of Boom’s 42-megawatt turbines for $1.25 billion to generate 1.21 gigawatts for its data centers. Boom said it will announce more details about a turbine factory next year, with first deliveries occurring in 2027.
To commercialize its Superpower stationary turbine, Boom raised $300 million in a round led by Darsana Capital Partners with participation from Altimeter Capital, Ark Invest, Bessemer Venture Partners, Robinhood Ventures, and Y Combinator.
Profits from the sale of Superpower units will go toward funding continued development of the company’s Overture supersonic aircraft, Boom founder and CEO Blake Scholl told TechCrunch.
It’s an arrangement that Scholl likens to SpaceX’s Starlink satellite constellation. The satellite internet service is reportedly profitable, helping the company to bankroll the development of its rockets.
“I’ve been kind of keeping my eyes open for 10 years for what could be our Starlink,” he said. “I said no to a thousand things because I concluded they were distractions. This one we’re saying yes to because it’s so clearly on path.”
Boom said Superpower and its airborne engine called Symphony share 80% of their parts. Earlier this year, Boom’s XB-1 demonstrator was the first civil aircraft developed by a private company to break the sound barrier.
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Crusoe is paying $1,033 per kilowatt of generating capacity. For that, Boom will deliver the turbines, generators, control systems, and preventative maintenance. Crusoe will have to provide everything else, including pollution controls, electrical connections, and so on.
That’s on the higher side for that type of power plant. A typical airplane-derived — or aeroderivative — turbine costs around $1,600 per kilowatt, a price that also includes pollution controls, engineering, construction, land acquisition, permitting, pipelines, and more.
In a typical project, the turbine and pollution controls contribute about 46% of a project’s total cost. Applying that percentage to Boom’s figures would likely push the total cost to over $2,000 per kilowatt. That’s pricey for a simple-cycle gas turbine and more in line with costs for combined-cycle gas turbines slated to come online in the early 2030s.
Boom’s Superpower is targeting 39% efficiency, similar to competitors. Combined cycle turbines can recover heat from the exhaust to boost efficiency above 60%.
Boom is also developing a “field upgrade” to convert its turbines from simple cycle to combined cycle, Scholl said. Operators could do so today using existing combined-cycle kits, though adding them would require longer installation times. “Those combined-cycle plants tend to be construction projects,” he said.
Like other aeroderivative turbine generators, Superpower will be delivered in a shipping container, and developers like Crusoe will be responsible for electrical and gas hookups in addition to pollution controls.
Scholl said the power plants should be “no louder” than existing aeroderivative turbines, though that’s not exactly quiet: Residents near xAI’s Colossus data center report hearing similarly sized turbines from at least half a mile away.
The first few stationary turbines will be made at Boom’s existing facilities while the company builds a larger factory. The goal is to produce 1 gigawatts’ worth in 2028, 2 gigawatts’ worth in 2029, and 4 gigawatts’ worth in 2030. If Boom can hit those numbers, it would represent a significant expansion in the turbines available to be deployed.
Boom still has a challenging few years ahead of it. If the company can pull it off, supersonic commercial flights could happen sooner than even Boom expected. But scaling production is never easy, and many startups have struggled to cross the valley of death that separates early-stage hardware companies from their commercial peers.
