This article feels like the perfect distillation of a uniquely American problem.
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?
Did I miss something or does the article not even say how much gas they need as an input to generate the 42MW? I see they deride conventional turbines for needing cooling, but the reason they do is to increase the temp differential between hot and cold end of the turbine because some clever fellow named Carnot figured out that the amount of energy you can extract depends on this. Instead it seems that they just full-tilt run a supersonic turbine and blow the hot exhaust with all its energy into the air. So what’s the efficiency of this?
You get 42MW inside the footprint of what looks like 2 truck trailers, that you can park in the parking lot next to the electrical transformers. Virtually no permitting or installation required.
To be fair, you end up needing insane amounts of batteries if you want to run 24/7/365 just on solar, particularly if you insist on building your data centres in places with dark winters.
> This article feels like the perfect distillation of a uniquely American problem.
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.
We're all too busy filling out forms to manufacture anything in the West. They don't have to declare their conflict minerals contents (which seem impossible to verify), or even try to measure the PFAS in their products (good luck figuring out the PFAS contents of complex products like electronics).
More like we've spent decades offshoring every step of the manufacturing pipeline - from material processing to manufacturing tooling and all the skills and expertise in between - and now it's reached a state where even if you wanted to spin up manufacturing on the same scale locally, you need those decades again to bring every part of the economy back to support it.
Managed to talk about china's energy buildout _without_ mention of renewables?
I think this pivot is 100% designed to get government money:
- natrual gas turbine
- china is scary
- something something it's a race
- china energy is good because no regulations, totally not because they are lapping the world on renewable buildout
Perhaps not in a 100% world, though I'll give you the point that they are useful now.
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.
If China had "no regulations" and was building out 100% coal, no one would be worrying that China industry would have an advantage due to low electricity cost vs rest of world.
China's energy buildout is still mostly coal. Go look at the last 20 years how much energy they've added for coal vs solar. Dont fall for the "solar has increased by 500%" trap.
We're using plane engines to generate electricity and my residential bill is almost $0.20/kWh because we invested in chat bots instead of the infrastructure the chat bots need.
Natural gas turbines are pretty common (power plants, large on site/mobile generators) and the efficiency levels of these are the same as what you'd see in similar use cases. Turbines don't really care what they're doing (within reason), these just happen to share a lot of parts with a plane engine.
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.
I spent years working in aerospace turbines. This is BS. Power generation turbines are designed to work at ambient sea level conditions. They don't rely on ambient air being especially cold for cooling, they can keep cool thanks to the large mass flow rate.
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.
> elaborate way to hop on the AI investment bandwagon ... 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’s interesting that this implies that building natural gas pipelines to data centers is easy, at least easier than building out substations and transmission lines. Because you don’t run a (or several) 42MW natural gas generator without a big fat natural gas pipe.
Why is it so much easier to build the pipelines than to bring in electric lines?
In Texas a lot of natural gas is wasted/burned away as it is not profitable to collect and transport it from all oil fields. These days quite a few places put small turbines to generate electricity to do cryptocurrency mining.
This will serve a similar use case just on a bigger scale.
WA state has the advantage of cheap electricity due to hydro projects, and before they were able to ship off their surplus to CA, they did a lot of aluminum production here to take advantage of it. I can see natural gas working similar, but I’ve also heard data centers want to take advantage of cheap hydro and wind power in western states.
They want to build them near the oil fields in texas. As of now most of those fields already run without much if any power infra in place on top of that they would be right by the natural gas generation.
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.
Transmission loss in gas pipes is probably lower than electric transmission?
Underground probably easier than above ground.
Lastly I think they are building data centers near natural gas fields...
I wouldn't expect so, because it's not just fugitive emissions we're talking about, but that you need to run a lot of big compressors to run pipelines. But often that cost isn't really counted because they just burn more gas to power them.
>Because you don’t run a (or several) 42MW natural gas generator without a big fat natural gas pipe.
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.
Oh come on, what is this crap? Absolutely no thermal efficiency numbers or anything else you could use to validate any claims. Especially if you are claiming that an aero-derived turbine is somehow going to be better than a purpose-built unit.
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.
Unfortunately there's too much distraction regarding the AI side of the discussion, to actually look at the generation tech itself.
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?
I also don't think it's necessarily true? A jet engine (which many many power turbines can run off of) can obviously run without cooling water on a hot day just fine.
Gas turbines have a role in energy production worldwide. If this means they can run more efficiently, then there's a place for it. If the intent is to run 24/7 then it should replace existing Gas 24/7 service deployment, not add new, unless there is a reason wind+solar+storage and a (smaller? different configuration) gas peaker cannot do the job.
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.
It could be a good, relatively portable gas peaker. Though I would have thought batteries might be a better step for peak load management?
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.
There are already quite a few rapid start gas peakers not only being produced but in-service. Nothing about Boom's stands out as being significantly different.
thats kind-of what I thought. GE sell a lot, so maybe this introduces some supply chain diversity and has a different maintenance burden and duty cycle. Thats about it.
> announcing Superpower, our new 42‑megawatt natural gas turbine
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.
Well, even Blake knows that Overture is highly unlikely to survive as a product. Best of luck to him with this pivot. I really wish him success. He has spent more than a decade of his life on this project.
> If America wants to build at the speed AI requires, vertical integration isn’t optional. We’re standing up our own foundry and our own large scale CNC machining capability.
Yet China, the industrial superpower, doesn't work like that. Nothing is vertically integrated and instead a massive amount of suppliers are part of a gigantic and flexible supply-chain.
The fact that CCP's China able to have a working market of independent industrial actors, whereas Venture Capital-funded America can only works with corporation-scale central planning is an interesting paradox that I would like to have an in depth explanation for.
"AI didn’t just need more turbines—it needed a new and fundamentally better turbine. Symphony was the perfect new engine to accelerate AI in America."
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!
Now deliver 500 turbines by Q2 2026... oh you can't because you need 4-5 years to build and scale up manufacturing and train a skilled workforce? Well that's better than 5-10 years to build centralized power plants... or just truck in a shit load of low skilled Mexicans to build out island solar and battery to alleviate bottle neck and throw in a bunch of diesel/gas generators.
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.
> It's a new distributed tech stack that can be spung up at scale incredible speed vs centralized generation infra.
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)
You can make frequency inertia with solar (even without batteries if you accept running with a constant reserve so with reduced efficiency). Spain showed that there is a learning curve, that's for sure, but their issue was a "simple" oscillation problem that can be fixed by adjusting frequency-follow rate and grid-disconnect rules. It wasn't like a peak of energy consumption or loss of energy production that only a rotating mass could compensate.
Hence Islanded i.e. skip grid because US incompetence is inability to hook up grid with multiyear lead times due to skilled labour shortage. The entire point is to skip the grid or rather, due to US constraints, hook up to grid not really an option to meet rollout timelines.
This sounds like the “t-shirt printers” of the 90s. While everyone was busy trying to invent the future, boring old manufacturing got ignored.
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.
This is all I can think of and it depresses me how exciting the video is about turning more materials into emissions. I get I have no power over these people building this, but I just wish they didn't make it. I don't want the world to keep building more amazing ways to burn things I or my neighbors will eventually have to breathe in.
What is strange about it? Normal power plants have 2-3 gigawatts. Gas turbine having 300MW is probably just below average. What am I missing? Is it some US thing where G scale is not 10^9?
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.
AI data centers still consume a lot less than most other things on the grid. In percentages it's less than 1%. Much less. It might get to a percent in a few years. The energy demand growth from other sources is much more significant. Things like industrial heating, domestic heating and other domestic usage, transport (car and truck charging), etc. are growing much more aggressively than even the most aggressive growth scenarios for AI.
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.
Today I learned a thing! It makes sense that subsonic engines and supersonic engines would be different in retrospect but upon reading the headline I thought for sure it was going to be some kind of weird "jump on the AI hype train" article.
Good for them for trying to find a profitable proving ground for their engines.
Normally I try to go with the most charitable interpretation, but this article makes it difficult.
> 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.
> China is adding solar. Mostly solar. The word "solar" does not appear even once in this press release, and that seems disingenuous.
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.
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 already have well over double the US solar output (US solar output is about 750 Twh according to this source, while China's is a bit over 2000 Twh) and their YoY solar increase is about 4x the US (600 Twh increase in China vs 150 Twh increase in the US)
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.
In the last year of that graph 2023-2024, the increase in solar was greater than any other source, including coal, it's 15x greater than nuclear.
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:
Yeah, its totally inefficient - according to Wikipedia a simple cycle gas turbine can be up to 43% efficient - with a combined cycle (you boil water with the first stage jet engine exhaust and then run a steam turbine off that) it can get up to 64%.
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.
Burning more fossil fuels in noisy, polluting ways is not a good tradeoff considering most “AI” itself is questionably a net positive, and certainly not worth the current levels of investment.
Notice as well that no mention of efficiency was made. Perhaps I missed it, but I’m somewhat familiar with power generation, and usually efficiency is front and center.
This feels cynical and ugly, and I am pretty disgusted by the way things are going in this space. I don't see any reason to trust Boom based on their history, and I am sick and tired of the "solution" to bad ideas being more bad ideas. We need renewables and grid infrastructure, not yet more fossil fuels.
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.
Whoa - no matter how wrong someone is or you feel they are, or how strongly a topic makes you feel, you can't post like this to Hacker News. It's vastly against the site guidelines.
all this for predictive text, not even robotics. Not protein folding, not simulations of the early universe. Not even some embodied AI learning from a simulated environment.
Great, that's what we need. More fossil fuel powered, CO² emitting, supersonic turbines polluting our environment. Unless I see a sea of solar powered carbon capturing machines,somewhere in the Saharan desert, churning the CO² back to natural gas to power these turbines, I hate this.
I think you're missing the point. Once we've bruteforced the computer god into being he will absolve us of all the sins of destroying the place we live and magically create for us a utopia of so much free energy that we won't have to worry about having an atmosphere.
We will create computer god and ask it how to save our environment and climate and it will look at all the data we have fed it over the years and say "You've known the answer for decades, you just didn't like it. Not building me would have been a good start."
I wonder how these elites (you are one, if you can reach San Altman by text) are so detached from reality, that they think that bragging about a gas powered turbine, in this day and age, in the given environment, for something as ludicrous as predictive text generation is a such a flex!
I didn't read it that way because Boom went through YC while Sam was president of YC. The connection makes a lot of sense, and dates back to pre-OpenAI days.
I would assume he's just telling the story as it happened.
So many cults of personality these days between Musk, Trump, Altman, Neuman (WeWork guy)...
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
It's also such a stupid question to ask. No one doubts AI needs fuckton of power. Not the fanboys or the haters or even the don't-cares.
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"?
Just vomited in my mouth a little bit. A supersonic aerospace company doing a half-assed pivot into fossil fuel electricity generation to, what, try to simultaneously capitalize on AI CAPEX while also soliciting government handouts?
Please don't post snarky, shallow dismissals on HN. You may not owe aerospace startups any better, but you owe the community better if you want to participate here.
What are you trying to say? That no company that makes money from the market can also try to get government funding, even for a different part of their business? Or is this only supersonic aerospace companies, not conventional aerospace? Or only if it's fossil fuel. What a bizarre list of conditions to make you vomit. You can't possibly have thought of that in advance. I suspect you don't know what you're saying at all.
I’m not going to bother formulating a serious response to such an incredibly insane attempt at shoving words and positions into my mouth to fit your own preconceived narrative.
> Meanwhile China is adding power capacity at a wartime pace—coal, gas, nuclear, everything—while America struggles to get a single transmission line permitted.
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.
I don’t understand your point about UPS 2976. You make it sound as if people there were hurt by the engine parts hitting them. But in actuality it is the airplane crashing into them which killed those unfortunate.
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 plane suffered an engine mount failure, which tore a hole in the wing, sprayed shrapnel into engine 2, which caused a compressor stall reducing thrust past the survivable level. Then it crashed into a fuel recycling plant with a full load of jet fuel.
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.
(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.)
This article feels like the perfect distillation of a uniquely American problem.
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?
> Some weird tech startup proposing a novel solution based on a product that isn't even in it's production phase yet
It's not even a novel solution, jet engines as stationary emergency 'power stations' goes back to at least the 1950s (e.g. search for TURBOLEKT here: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/VEB_Entwicklungsbau_Pirna).
Did I miss something or does the article not even say how much gas they need as an input to generate the 42MW? I see they deride conventional turbines for needing cooling, but the reason they do is to increase the temp differential between hot and cold end of the turbine because some clever fellow named Carnot figured out that the amount of energy you can extract depends on this. Instead it seems that they just full-tilt run a supersonic turbine and blow the hot exhaust with all its energy into the air. So what’s the efficiency of this?
You get 42MW inside the footprint of what looks like 2 truck trailers, that you can park in the parking lot next to the electrical transformers. Virtually no permitting or installation required.
Yes...ish, I largely agree that the footprint is smaller per MW and quite a boon.
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.
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I think a 42MW turbine might run into some permitting issues regarding safe noise levels.
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To be fair, you end up needing insane amounts of batteries if you want to run 24/7/365 just on solar, particularly if you insist on building your data centres in places with dark winters.
Wind is better than solar in many places and somewhat reduces the need for batteries
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by the way, china achieved the trendline in that comparison graph by installing solar and batteries
> This article feels like the perfect distillation of a uniquely American problem.
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.
It's funny to portray "USA need more power for GPUs" and then contrast China getting the power to actual industry making actual stuff useful to people
We're all too busy filling out forms to manufacture anything in the West. They don't have to declare their conflict minerals contents (which seem impossible to verify), or even try to measure the PFAS in their products (good luck figuring out the PFAS contents of complex products like electronics).
More like we've spent decades offshoring every step of the manufacturing pipeline - from material processing to manufacturing tooling and all the skills and expertise in between - and now it's reached a state where even if you wanted to spin up manufacturing on the same scale locally, you need those decades again to bring every part of the economy back to support it.
100%
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.
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Managed to talk about china's energy buildout _without_ mention of renewables? I think this pivot is 100% designed to get government money: - natrual gas turbine - china is scary - something something it's a race - china energy is good because no regulations, totally not because they are lapping the world on renewable buildout
China alone this year has added 221GW of Solar Energy, which is about 2x the rest of the world combined.
it's a nice pivot though - turbines are just turbines.
Turbines are useful even in a 100% renewable powered world.
Perhaps not in a 100% world, though I'll give you the point that they are useful now.
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.
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If China had "no regulations" and was building out 100% coal, no one would be worrying that China industry would have an advantage due to low electricity cost vs rest of world.
China's energy buildout is still mostly coal. Go look at the last 20 years how much energy they've added for coal vs solar. Dont fall for the "solar has increased by 500%" trap.
You’re absolutely correct.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_China
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Coal consumption has peaked there. Solar is growing explosively.
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We're using plane engines to generate electricity and my residential bill is almost $0.20/kWh because we invested in chat bots instead of the infrastructure the chat bots need.
Make it make sense.
Natural gas turbines are pretty common (power plants, large on site/mobile generators) and the efficiency levels of these are the same as what you'd see in similar use cases. Turbines don't really care what they're doing (within reason), these just happen to share a lot of parts with a plane engine.
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.
Jealous sitting here in MA, where we pay $0.35/kWh and burn a ton of methane to get that.
That is some of the most expensive electricity in the world.
$0.35.... wow
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I can rustle up some environmentalists and we can shutdown some more of the infrastructure. Shall I?
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?
I spent years working in aerospace turbines. This is BS. Power generation turbines are designed to work at ambient sea level conditions. They don't rely on ambient air being especially cold for cooling, they can keep cool thanks to the large mass flow rate.
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.
> elaborate way to hop on the AI investment bandwagon ... 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.
It’s interesting that this implies that building natural gas pipelines to data centers is easy, at least easier than building out substations and transmission lines. Because you don’t run a (or several) 42MW natural gas generator without a big fat natural gas pipe.
Why is it so much easier to build the pipelines than to bring in electric lines?
In Texas a lot of natural gas is wasted/burned away as it is not profitable to collect and transport it from all oil fields. These days quite a few places put small turbines to generate electricity to do cryptocurrency mining.
This will serve a similar use case just on a bigger scale.
> Why is it so much easier to build the pipelines than to bring in electric lines?
It's not necessarily easier to do one or the other. It's about which one is faster.
WA state has the advantage of cheap electricity due to hydro projects, and before they were able to ship off their surplus to CA, they did a lot of aluminum production here to take advantage of it. I can see natural gas working similar, but I’ve also heard data centers want to take advantage of cheap hydro and wind power in western states.
They want to build them near the oil fields in texas. As of now most of those fields already run without much if any power infra in place on top of that they would be right by the natural gas generation.
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.
Transmission loss in gas pipes is probably lower than electric transmission? Underground probably easier than above ground. Lastly I think they are building data centers near natural gas fields...
I wouldn't expect so, because it's not just fugitive emissions we're talking about, but that you need to run a lot of big compressors to run pipelines. But often that cost isn't really counted because they just burn more gas to power them.
I'm guessing it's not just the overhead lines, but you need the actual power plants somewhere.
>Because you don’t run a (or several) 42MW natural gas generator without a big fat natural gas pipe.
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.
This to me is the strongest proof that we are in a bubble so far.
Oh come on, what is this crap? Absolutely no thermal efficiency numbers or anything else you could use to validate any claims. Especially if you are claiming that an aero-derived turbine is somehow going to be better than a purpose-built unit.
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.
Unfortunately there's too much distraction regarding the AI side of the discussion, to actually look at the generation tech itself.
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?
I also don't think it's necessarily true? A jet engine (which many many power turbines can run off of) can obviously run without cooling water on a hot day just fine.
Gas turbines have a role in energy production worldwide. If this means they can run more efficiently, then there's a place for it. If the intent is to run 24/7 then it should replace existing Gas 24/7 service deployment, not add new, unless there is a reason wind+solar+storage and a (smaller? different configuration) gas peaker cannot do the job.
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.
It could be a good, relatively portable gas peaker. Though I would have thought batteries might be a better step for peak load management?
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.
There are already quite a few rapid start gas peakers not only being produced but in-service. Nothing about Boom's stands out as being significantly different.
thats kind-of what I thought. GE sell a lot, so maybe this introduces some supply chain diversity and has a different maintenance burden and duty cycle. Thats about it.
> announcing Superpower, our new 42‑megawatt natural gas turbine
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.
You missed the iron law of the universe, which is never get between a capitalist and the possibility of a bucket of money.
Well, even Blake knows that Overture is highly unlikely to survive as a product. Best of luck to him with this pivot. I really wish him success. He has spent more than a decade of his life on this project.
> Superpower is sort of like our Starlink moment
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 found this paragraph very interesting:
> If America wants to build at the speed AI requires, vertical integration isn’t optional. We’re standing up our own foundry and our own large scale CNC machining capability.
Yet China, the industrial superpower, doesn't work like that. Nothing is vertically integrated and instead a massive amount of suppliers are part of a gigantic and flexible supply-chain.
The fact that CCP's China able to have a working market of independent industrial actors, whereas Venture Capital-funded America can only works with corporation-scale central planning is an interesting paradox that I would like to have an in depth explanation for.
"AI didn’t just need more turbines—it needed a new and fundamentally better turbine. Symphony was the perfect new engine to accelerate AI in America."
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!
Now deliver 500 turbines by Q2 2026... oh you can't because you need 4-5 years to build and scale up manufacturing and train a skilled workforce? Well that's better than 5-10 years to build centralized power plants... or just truck in a shit load of low skilled Mexicans to build out island solar and battery to alleviate bottle neck and throw in a bunch of diesel/gas generators.
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.
> It's a new distributed tech stack that can be spung up at scale incredible speed vs centralized generation infra.
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)
You can make frequency inertia with solar (even without batteries if you accept running with a constant reserve so with reduced efficiency). Spain showed that there is a learning curve, that's for sure, but their issue was a "simple" oscillation problem that can be fixed by adjusting frequency-follow rate and grid-disconnect rules. It wasn't like a peak of energy consumption or loss of energy production that only a rotating mass could compensate.
Hence Islanded i.e. skip grid because US incompetence is inability to hook up grid with multiyear lead times due to skilled labour shortage. The entire point is to skip the grid or rather, due to US constraints, hook up to grid not really an option to meet rollout timelines.
This sounds like the “t-shirt printers” of the 90s. While everyone was busy trying to invent the future, boring old manufacturing got ignored.
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.
Selling shovels
How much pollution would this generate?
This is all I can think of and it depresses me how exciting the video is about turning more materials into emissions. I get I have no power over these people building this, but I just wish they didn't make it. I don't want the world to keep building more amazing ways to burn things I or my neighbors will eventually have to breathe in.
Hmm curious as to how loud it will make the data center.
How loud are these turbines? Where will they be used?
I can't wait for the town hall meetings in areas where a datacenter is coming "you want us to live next to supersonic jets powering a datacenter?"
Already happening: https://www.memphisflyer.com/southaven-residents-raise-conce...
> About three months later, we had a signed deal for 1.21 gigawatts and had started manufacturing the first turbine.
Great Scott!
I think we had the same though at the same time. Did you also hit your head on the toilet?
What is strange about it? Normal power plants have 2-3 gigawatts. Gas turbine having 300MW is probably just below average. What am I missing? Is it some US thing where G scale is not 10^9?
It's a joke about the movie Back To The Future and 1.21 Jiggawatts.
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That is clearly an intentional reference.
They probably did that deliberately, like when Google IPO'd for $2,718,281,828.
I hate the product.
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.
AI data centers still consume a lot less than most other things on the grid. In percentages it's less than 1%. Much less. It might get to a percent in a few years. The energy demand growth from other sources is much more significant. Things like industrial heating, domestic heating and other domestic usage, transport (car and truck charging), etc. are growing much more aggressively than even the most aggressive growth scenarios for AI.
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.
Today I learned a thing! It makes sense that subsonic engines and supersonic engines would be different in retrospect but upon reading the headline I thought for sure it was going to be some kind of weird "jump on the AI hype train" article.
Good for them for trying to find a profitable proving ground for their engines.
Seriously? This couldn't be more "jumping on the AI hype train" if it tried.
Normally I try to go with the most charitable interpretation, but this article makes it difficult.
> 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.
> China is adding solar. Mostly solar. The word "solar" does not appear even once in this press release, and that seems disingenuous.
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.
> China is adding solar. Mostly solar. The word "solar" does not appear even once in this press release, and that seems disingenuous.
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 already have well over double the US solar output (US solar output is about 750 Twh according to this source, while China's is a bit over 2000 Twh) and their YoY solar increase is about 4x the US (600 Twh increase in China vs 150 Twh increase in the US)
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.
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In the last year of that graph 2023-2024, the increase in solar was greater than any other source, including coal, it's 15x greater than nuclear.
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...
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> Solar is a tiny portion of new energy capacity in China compared to coal, oil, and gas.
That graph shows production, not capacity, nor installed capacity in each year.
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are we looking at the same graph? if you look at the past decade or so, the "solar" slice is clearly widening the fastest
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This is designed for "fast" and "high power", but not for efficiency: it's not a combined cycle plant.
Yeah, its totally inefficient - according to Wikipedia a simple cycle gas turbine can be up to 43% efficient - with a combined cycle (you boil water with the first stage jet engine exhaust and then run a steam turbine off that) it can get up to 64%.
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
It is at least 50% AI slop.
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.
Does it make anyone a little sad that we could have actual abundance with solar and wind and nuclear?
Also, this is only commercially viable because this regime has rendered the EPA functionally powerless.
Not really. Makes me hopeful. The constraint right now to renewables in America is connecting them to the grid. The lead times are still in the years.
I am hopeful that these constraints breed innovation and new solutions to the space.
Burning more fossil fuels in noisy, polluting ways is not a good tradeoff considering most “AI” itself is questionably a net positive, and certainly not worth the current levels of investment.
Notice as well that no mention of efficiency was made. Perhaps I missed it, but I’m somewhat familiar with power generation, and usually efficiency is front and center.
Fact seems to be, nobody doing “AI” gives a damn.
1.21 jigowatts? Great Scott! the only power source capable of generating 1.21 gigawatts of electricity is a bolt of lightning
Grifts really have become mainstream.
Hear me out... we could just stop building enormous AI data centers for money suck products with no actual net positive revenue.
This feels cynical and ugly, and I am pretty disgusted by the way things are going in this space. I don't see any reason to trust Boom based on their history, and I am sick and tired of the "solution" to bad ideas being more bad ideas. We need renewables and grid infrastructure, not yet more fossil fuels.
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
Whoa - no matter how wrong someone is or you feel they are, or how strongly a topic makes you feel, you can't post like this to Hacker News. It's vastly against the site guidelines.
If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46166929 and 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.
>someone
https://www.ycombinator.com/blog/boom-yc-w16-is-building-an-...
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all this for predictive text, not even robotics. Not protein folding, not simulations of the early universe. Not even some embodied AI learning from a simulated environment.
Great, that's what we need. More fossil fuel powered, CO² emitting, supersonic turbines polluting our environment. Unless I see a sea of solar powered carbon capturing machines,somewhere in the Saharan desert, churning the CO² back to natural gas to power these turbines, I hate this.
Hey, but imagine all the nano banana images we can create!
I think you're missing the point. Once we've bruteforced the computer god into being he will absolve us of all the sins of destroying the place we live and magically create for us a utopia of so much free energy that we won't have to worry about having an atmosphere.
We will create computer god and ask it how to save our environment and climate and it will look at all the data we have fed it over the years and say "You've known the answer for decades, you just didn't like it. Not building me would have been a good start."
I wonder how these elites (you are one, if you can reach San Altman by text) are so detached from reality, that they think that bragging about a gas powered turbine, in this day and age, in the given environment, for something as ludicrous as predictive text generation is a such a flex!
> I texted with Sam Altman—who confirmed power was indeed a major constraint.
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.
Here's how academics do it:
> 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 didn't read it that way because Boom went through YC while Sam was president of YC. The connection makes a lot of sense, and dates back to pre-OpenAI days.
I would assume he's just telling the story as it happened.
It's also a kind of ideological signpost.
We’re looking at classy as a small dot in the rear view mirror with this current generation of elites.
[flagged]
So many cults of personality these days between Musk, Trump, Altman, Neuman (WeWork guy)...
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
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It's also such a stupid question to ask. No one doubts AI needs fuckton of power. Not the fanboys or the haters or even the don't-cares.
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"?
But if it wasn’t AI it would be something else. Remember when Bitcoin was consuming all the energy and destroying the environment?
I asked Florida man if there's a gator in the nearby lake, he said prolly
Just vomited in my mouth a little bit. A supersonic aerospace company doing a half-assed pivot into fossil fuel electricity generation to, what, try to simultaneously capitalize on AI CAPEX while also soliciting government handouts?
Come on, get serious.
Please don't post snarky, shallow dismissals on HN. You may not owe aerospace startups any better, but you owe the community better if you want to participate here.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
And it started by browsing X, as most things do, of course.
What are you trying to say? That no company that makes money from the market can also try to get government funding, even for a different part of their business? Or is this only supersonic aerospace companies, not conventional aerospace? Or only if it's fossil fuel. What a bizarre list of conditions to make you vomit. You can't possibly have thought of that in advance. I suspect you don't know what you're saying at all.
I’m not going to bother formulating a serious response to such an incredibly insane attempt at shoving words and positions into my mouth to fit your own preconceived narrative.
Be better.
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> Meanwhile China is adding power capacity at a wartime pace—coal, gas, nuclear, everything—while America struggles to get a single transmission line permitted.
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.
They're still scrubbing the scorch marks out of the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UPS_Airlines_Flight_2976 tragedy.
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.
I don’t understand your point about UPS 2976. You make it sound as if people there were hurt by the engine parts hitting them. But in actuality it is the airplane crashing into them which killed those unfortunate.
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 plane suffered an engine mount failure, which tore a hole in the wing, sprayed shrapnel into engine 2, which caused a compressor stall reducing thrust past the survivable level. Then it crashed into a fuel recycling plant with a full load of jet fuel.
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.
We do use gyroscopic power storage, see e.g.
https://h-cpc.cat.com/cmms/v2?f=subfamily&it=group&cid=402&l...
https://www.activepower.com/
...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.)