AI Power Crunch: Gas Turbines Backlogged, Supercritical CO2 as Solution
CatAstro_Piyush · x · 2026-08-24
The bottleneck for AI power isn't generation capacity on paper, but hardware availability. Heavy-duty gas turbines are backlogged 5-7 years, with GE Vernova booking slots for 2031. The market is dominated by three companies (GE, Siemens Energy, Mitsubishi), and rotor forgings come from a handful of plants.
Supercritical CO2 turbines are a potential solution: they are 1/10th the size of steam equivalents, requiring less forging and enabling faster installs. While not yet commercially scaled, the competition is now about delivery dates rather than just efficiency.
More from Infra
- Marin 535B open-source model training starts with 2.7e24 FLOPs plan — DavidBennett__ · 2026-08-24
- Aquaduck launches 'Community Cloud' for low-cost inference on home devices — punkyrockypocky · 2026-08-24
- Daily vs Monthly Budgets Shape AI Development Workflows — schwentker · 2026-08-24
- d-Matrix reveals DRAM ALL AROUND at Hot Chips 2026 — jwt0625 · 2026-08-24
- Grok suggests transparent siting and self-funded power to ease datacenter backlash — MikePFrank · 2026-08-24
- Paper Proposes Compute-Efficient Hyperparameter Transfer for MoE — kakaocorp · 2026-08-24