Some weird tech startup proposing a novel solution based on a product that isn't even in it's production phase yet. Lots of pretty 3d renders and a wall of (what appears to be AI written) corpo-speak proposing some crazy technology that will revolutionize x.
It looks cool -- don't get me wrong -- but how is this going to get power online faster than just installing solar and batteries?
But 42MW energy doesn't come from nowhere, fuel needs to be considered. And there everyone has their own constraints.
The AI companies will likely care about $ and little else.
Engineers will point out that 42MW fuel takes up space and supply on an ongoing basis.
Other people will be worried about the externalities of burning 42MW of something vs solar panels and batteries etc.
You can't please all of the people.
Presumably a static turbine is minimizing noisy thrust in exchange for torque while also exhausting through an expansion chamber surrounded by deflective earthworks or some other shielding. (Although the one in the article is indeed all outside in the open.)
I think at this point LinkedIn culture is fairly globalized. Though America may be to blame for getting it there, largely via Deloitte & co originally. It's originally the language of managerialism.
Make it make sense.
The cost issue is completely unrelated to supply or usage, there is a cyclic issue of power companies using their profits for lobbying in order to push through measures that allow them to further increase their rates. It is often far more than is publicly disclosed.
For example, last year in this state my power company made billions of dollars and claims they spent less than a million on political contributions. But if you look at their donations, grants, and development programs there is over a hundred million dollars mostly going to companies and nonprofits owned in part by the same politicians or their family members, as well as the municipalities where the policymakers live.
In my state the combined total of rate increases in the past five years for both electricity and natural gas is >1.5x compared to inflation. Each time it is framed in the press as a good thing "we reached a solid deal, for less than half as much of what they were asking!". Every year the profits exceed their expectations by a few percent, each year more people are having their power shut off.
https://www.seattle.gov/city-light/residential-services/bill...
(Oh wow off peak will be 0.08$?!)
To quote one such government official:
> Sex is good but have you tried having your country shutting down its last nuclear power plants in 30 mn?
Personal experience: In my town a public parking lot could not be built due to it possibly being "endangered moth" habitat.
There are places where you can still build things in the US, but they are more and more scarce.
it's a nice pivot though - turbines are just turbines.
In a 100% renewable world we would not be extracting or refining oil. Natural gas (used by these turbines) is a byproduct of oil drilling. Were we not burning the oil, the natural gas might be too expensive alone.
Also, in a 100% renewable world we would (by definition) have enough generation all the time - (covered by batteries and good baseload sources) that turbine power was no longer required to cover peak loads.
It'll be some combination of demand management (which isn't nearly as horrifying as people make it out to be), pumped hydro, long-duration batteries like iron-air, but also possibly burning hydrogen or hydrogen-derived synthetic fuels (produced by electrolysis when hydrogen is abundant) and/or biofuels in turbines.
Basically, you end up having to overbuild to crazy levels, or build insane amounts of battery storage, which only gets used a few days a year.
China didn’t start adding much in the way of solar prior to about 2020, whereas they added lots of coal generation in the past 20 years.
This is very helpful to deal with variability with renewable output.
Recent Volts episode has great overview of China's electro-tech build out, world is at or near peak fossil fuel across all sectors and countries (with 1 notable exception), etc.
Clean electrification is inevitable - A conversation with Kingsmill Bond of Ember Energy. [2025/11/21]
There is no technological difference between boom's engine and conventional jet turbines. It is still a subsonic turbine, it just happens to sit behind a diffuser that slows the air from supersonic to subsonic speeds. Genuine supersonic turbines are a radically different, and much less efficient, technology. Turbines for supersonic propulsion are actually more temperature sensitive and less efficient than those for subsonic applications specifically because they need to prevent more heating in the compression stages to keep their combustion chambers stable.
The other talking points are likewise bogus. The problem with aeroderivative turbines is maintenance - planes need to be high performance and don't stay up in the air for very long, so their engines are designed around frequent maintenance events. Powerplants, especially those for datacenters, need consistent uptime, not good power to weight ratios.
Boom isn't doing anything special in terms of materials or data monitoring. Yes, power turbines have been a thing for decades, and in those decades they have been arguably the most advanced machines humans have built industrially at any given time. Going back to the maintenance thing, turns out people really want to know if there's an issue before their $200 million machine fails.
I like Boom, I have friends working for Boom. I presume this is just an elaborate way to hop on the AI investment bandwagon. I get it, but it's still ugly to see. I hope this doesn't begin a string of hype-creep that causes their actual goal to fail.
their current goal might already be "failing" (as in, lack of real demand for hypersonic travel). Investment getting hard to obtain means they're looking for more/broader investment from other investors. Thus, the hopping on of the AI bandwagon.
It doesn't paint a pretty picture tbh.
Why is it so much easier to build the pipelines than to bring in electric lines?
This will serve a similar use case just on a bigger scale.
It's not necessarily easier to do one or the other. It's about which one is faster.
Add that the manpower and expertise of running generators is abundant there and it's a prettt solid idea if they can actually make it.
at 40KWh/kg and 50% efficiency you'd need 2 tons/hour for a 42MW generator, which is a one large tanker per day. Thus you can do without gas pipeline which is a big advantage over electric wires and other static infra when you need to scale power quickly.
Sidenote - it all brings memories of how 34 years ago i worked couple months in a Siberia village powered by working 24x7 gas turbine from a helicopter.
Vs. the original article - i doubt that supersonic core is the best. Supersonic engine is designed to get a significant pressure from ram effect. Until supersonic speed reached, such an engine has bad efficiency due to low compression - that is why Concorde was accelerating to supersonic speed on afterburners (atrocious efficiency just to get to efficient speed as fast as possible). The modern engines from say 787 - they have high compression and best high temp mono-crystal blades, etc. - would be much better.
The "supersonic engines are better because they are designed to operate at hotter temperatures" argument is particularly insane: turbine efficiency is driven by turbine inlet temperature (already 3000ish C), not ambient temperature.
I suppose it's only right that VCs are going to get scammed by LLM slop.
For all their discussion of high temperature operation, it seems the only advantage at the end of the day is to eliminate water consumption in cooling. I question if that's really so valuable?
If this works as a rapid start gas peaker, it could help in the shift off coal and diesel. It depends on the CO/CO2 burden.
This might sit somewhere between peak load and base load?
Since the CO/CO2 exhaust from this turbine should be able to be captured fairly well, would it be possible to capture it on the spot into tanks of some kind? There are most probably some large thermal issues to deal with here.. I also wonder about the MIT COF-99 (https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/exotic-powder-pul...) that eats up CO2 very efficiently.
If simply CH4 is being passed to the turbine, is the water generated from the combustion being captured anywhere?
What about the sound characteristics of this beasty? There are cases in the US of people noticing the new AI data centre fans whining at all hours.
There'll be an engineer/physicist out there somewhere who'll come up with a generally efficient way to move heat around (Graphene ?) and he'll start a multi-billion dollar business.
Is global warming solved? Last time I checked, I was to throw away my repairable ICE vehicle for an expensive unrepairable disposable vehicle in order to save the planet. Just curious how a 42-megawatt gas turbine is helping the planet.
Great analogy if it pays off.
I'd wonder how it competes with nuclear for scale and existing gas turbines for cost and efficiency.
I completely hate that we can't just motivate this in terms of making electricity, the stuff we all use every day for a hundred things. No, it has to be about AI. Bah!
Turns out printing t-shirts isn’t that different from printing silicon. Now Taiwan produces 90% of the world’s advanced chips and NVIDIA is the most valuable company in the world.
Boom’s founder, Blake, comes from a e-commerce background. What a legend for this innovation.
The problem isn't better turbine, it's lead times that can satisfy data center demands at current rollout timeline. America being america makes large scale centralized infra difficult, building supply chains for essentially aviation turbines may be faster, but not more than just slapping down renewables and diesel/gas generators. You can get all the commodity generators and solar tomorrow.
Like ~85% of of PRC's new power generation this year growth is mostly renewables. It's a new distributed tech stack that can be spung up at scale incredible speed vs centralized generation infra. PRC built out about 300GW of renewables this year, US data centre needs projected at 100GW by 2035 with no sign centralized plants will be online in time. Combine with some dirty generators and US datacentres can survive on islanded utilities until the bubble burst.
When you get too much renewables solar/wind you can get blackouts like spain did. Fast grids fail fast. It's also important to have grid inertia to resist changes in frequency (which you get from due to the kinetic energy stored in spinning generators)
Great Scott!
But as a business staggery for Boom Supersonic, it kind of seems like a good idea. They get a (hopefully short term) revenue stream, and a whole bunch of "real world" testing on their engine core.
Electrification of the economy, which is a thing that at least the US is way behind on, is going to be a massive driver of electricity demand across the world. And a lot of countries are going to benefit from cost savings there. Not having to import expensive oil and gas in favor of cheaply produced solar/wind energy is going to wipe out quite a few billions from the trade balance of countries across the world. China is leading by example here. Their diesel imports are declining sharply already. Investments in renewables are rising accordingly. This is not driven by green washing but by raw economics.
For the same reason, oil and gas prices usage is predicted to enter a steady decline pretty much everywhere. The IEA (known for overly conservative oil biased predictions) is predicting this will be in decline by 2030. They are probably wrong again and it might be a few years sooner. In China next year is a better estimate.
Most growth on the grid (80-90%) is driven by renewables + battery addition to the grid. It's actually not even close in most countries. Including the US. Gas turbines are hard to get in a hurry. Most of the ones that are realistically going to be installed soonish were ordered quite some time ago. Same with nuclear reactors. Supply of those is even less elastic (decades rather than years).
In the mean time, there are hundreds of gw of clean energy (which can be ordered and brought online with very short lead times) coming online every year. Think a few dozen of nuclear reactors worth of capacity. In the US alone. Every year. Vs. a handful of nuclear reactors over the next decade. And a sprinkling of gas plants barely replacing lost capacity (closures of coal and older gas plants). All at great cost of course and typically after long delays.
A lot of the AI related fossil fuel usage growth is increasing load on existing infrastructure; which for cost reasons was being under utilized. As soon as cheaper power can be secured, that capacity will revert back to being underutilized. That's just simple economics.
Whether the US will be able to adapt to other countries doing things cheaper and better than them remains to be seen. It looks like it will have lots of expensive and obsolete gas infrastructure pretty soon. And a lot of debt that financed that. And a lot of data centers operating under high gas prices competing with data centers built close to ones with access to cheap renewables might become a thing as well. Some people are predicting a bubble. When that bursts, the more economical data centers might have a higher chance of surviving.
Good for them for trying to find a profitable proving ground for their engines.
> Meanwhile China is adding power capacity at a wartime pace—coal, gas, nuclear, everything....
China is adding solar. Mostly solar. The word "solar" does not appear even once in this press release, and that seems disingenuous.
I _do_ think there's a place for more efficient use of the fossil fuels we do have. People are going to continue to burn natural gas for a while, so we might as well do it better I guess. But America isn't going to make up the energy deficit with fossil fuels, no matter how "clever" we are.
They are adding everything. They know baseload is important so they build nuclear. They know they can't fill the hole fast enough, so they are still building some coal.
On the contrary, check out this graph:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/energy-consumption-by-sou...
Solar is a tiny portion of new energy capacity in China compared to coal, oil, and gas. But it is similar to nuclear as of 2024. New coal production swamps everything else combined.
They are also increasing coal usage, you are correct, however in the past 2 years, their solar output has increased significantly, to the point where it increased more than their coal output in 2024.
My point is that the comment you are quoting is actually technically correct, if you compare 2023 and 2024 in that graph for example, solar was the largest increase in output.
And unless people are shoveling coal directly into the data centres this electricity generating gas turbine is intended to be used for the electricity generation mix is more appropriate to conapre:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-production-by...
I mean... Seems obvious, no?
Even if we give China the most charity and take their 2025 results at face vault(even though they NEED to be independently verified) China is at best average when it comes % of gridpower that is renewable. Off the top of my head I think they are like 27-30% renewable. But its actually worse because they are the biggest polluter by a mile. Bigger the next 6 biggest polluters combined.
That graph shows production, not capacity, nor installed capacity in each year.
Solar capacity and say nuclear / coal / gas / hydro / fuel oil capacity
Are different beasts.
When solar advocates bang on about adding X gigawatts of capacity, they’re being dishonest. What they really mean is they added X/4, because, obviously, it’s sunny only about 25% of the time throughout a year.
Adding batteries doesn’t change that. Still have to over build.
So let’s focus on the numbers that reflect actual production, so we can have an honest conversation.
Nuclear / coal / gas / hydro / fuel oil, even biomass have capacity factors typically about 80%, often about 90%.
Wind and solar are never going up ro those capacity factors, even with batteries (including pumped hydro).
Have you considered working for the IEA?
Fundamental to the Law of Propaganda is the rule that you can prove anything if you ignore enough data or facts. Just ignore the things that don't fit your preferred conclusion and everything just works!
So like this there is possibly about 20% of (a lot of) energy/fuel just wasted. You can get even better, running something like a city wide district heating off the waste heat from the steam turbine - potentially reaching 100% in the sense that people get heating, warm running water or possibly also process heat for industrial use.
Or you can do none of that and power a datacenter of questionable utility with it at about 40% efficiency. :P
Siemens power-generating turbines are designed for -50C/+50C temperature envelope. All jet engines lose efficiency at higher ambient temperature due to thermodynamics, no matter how good their HP turbine blade tech.
Also, this is only commercially viable because this regime has rendered the EPA functionally powerless.
I am hopeful that these constraints breed innovation and new solutions to the space.
Fact seems to be, nobody doing “AI” gives a damn.
Additionally,
1) Aeroderivative gas turbines have been around for decades. "Oh but we have supersonic engines" does not change the fundamental equation
2) They're proposing burning more fossil fuels dug up from the ground to feed a beast that in my opinion is destroying the entire world economy, and certainly harming freedom
3) Where are they even getting the fuel? Magic? Someone has to build the pipelines, and someone has to supply the fuel.
Note: edited for civility
If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.
Edit: you've unfortunately been doing this repeatedly lately - for example https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46166929 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45836368 - and we've already warned you once (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44682844). If you keep posting like this, we're going to end up banning you. I don't want to ban you because your account also posts good things, so if you'd please fix this, we'd be grateful.
Such a cheap flex right up-front, and with an em-dash to boot. I get it, it's powerful to boast about such a connection. It's just not very classy.
> Sam Altman confirmed power was indeed a major constraint [1].
> [1]: Personal communication.
Or even better:
> Power is a major constraint (Sam Altman, personal communication, December 9, 2025).
I would assume he's just telling the story as it happened.
Maybe it started with Jobs, maybe it's always been a thing in other spaces (politics, religion...) and is now coming to business and these uber wealthy individuals who put their pants on two legs at a time
There are times when concentration of capital leads to a disproportionate influence of personal relationships and one-on-one deal-making. The same can be said of political or attention capital, not just wealth.
To be fair, that's also what Aristocracy always was, they were just less active in forcing their mad visions onto the world.
What next? "I emailed Donald Knuth—who confirmed software does mostly run on computers"? "I at-ed the Pope who confirmed that he is currently a Catholic"?
Come on, get serious.
Be better.
I have been saying for years that upgrading civilization requires more power output, not conservation and windmills. If we had been investing in nuclear since the 1960s we would be ready for the needs of next generation technologies and we could do it without burning fossil fuels.
I understand that turbines are very handy in power generation but we don't use gyroscopic power storage because the inertia gets scary at high RPMs. Turbines lake the momentum but make up for it by being entirely made of knives. You lose an engine mount or throw a blade and you're deep in the shit.
Even aviation turbines are quite safe and uncontained engine mallfunctions are very rarely a problem. On top of that there is every reason to think that ground based power generating applications can be even safer. There weight is much less of a constraint, so you can easily armour the container to a much higher assurance level. The terrestrial turbine is not jostled around so you have less of a concern about gyroscopic effects. And finally you can install the power generating turbine with a much larger keep out zone. All three factors making terrestrial power generating jets safer than the aviation ones.
The scary part of the mount failure is that the mounts cracked in an unexposed part where visual inspection did not reveal the damage. It wasn't due for a teardown and inspection until it had traveled 25% (80% of the maintenance window) farther. That's why they grounded the entire fleet.
Takeoffs are dangerous because they run the engines hard, and parts are operating in the supersonic range.
https://h-cpc.cat.com/cmms/v2?f=subfamily&it=group&cid=402&l...
...and probably others.
(A couple of decades ago I worked for a company that was a tenant at a datacenter that used these instead of batteries; it's not new or particularly exotic technology.)