SpaceX to make gas-turbine blades in-house as AI power crunch strains supply chain
AccBalanced · x · 2026-09-19
AI infrastructure has hit physical bottlenecks: SpaceX plans to manufacture gas-turbine blades in-house because the existing supply chain is too slow. Even with land, GPUs, servers and demand lined up, transformers, switchgear and turbines gate usable megawatts — U.S. transformer lead times can exceed three years, and in-house blade casting could accelerate turbine deployment by up to 18 months. Blades involve single-crystal nickel superalloys grown in vacuum furnaces where tiny defects scrap parts, making the constraint hard to brute-force.
More from Infra
- Malaysia poised to become a compute superpower with both US and Chinese chips by next year — basedjensen · 2026-11-04
- ByteDance details USDB storage system: 85.8% lower write latency for recommender sequences — _reachsumit · 2026-11-04
- Oracle cancels $7B chip leasing deal with Tencent, FT reports — SumitGup · 2026-11-04
- Inference engine shrunk to 1023 bytes, still runs SmolLM2-135M — cneuralnetwork · 2026-11-04
- Musk says space data centers are 'looking pretty appealing right now' — elonmusk · 2026-11-04
- Data centers are turning to old jet engines as the wait for power grows — IndependentCoast3974 · 2026-11-04