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.
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