Boom Supersonic wants to build the world’s first commercial supersonic airliner. Founded in 2014, the company set out to make air travel dramatically faster — up to twice the speed of today’s passenger jets — while also aiming for a smaller environmental footprint. For years, Boom has focused on developing the high-performance engine technology needed to sustain supersonic flight.
Though the company has not yet debuted its revolutionary jet, last year it identified a new and potentially lucrative application for its novel technology: generating electricity for the data centers powering the artificial intelligence boom.
Many of these data centers want the kind of flexible, around-the-clock energy associated with combined-cycle natural gas turbines. These heavy-duty machines burn gas to spin turbines and generate electricity, then capture the associated heat and use it to spin the turbines some more. As far as fossil fuel generation goes, they are among the most efficient options for dispatchable baseload power. But with demand for these turbines surging and supply increasingly tight, developers are turning to creative alternatives.
The upshot of all this creativity is clear: Much of the data center build-out is poised to be powered by natural gas — and the climate consequences that come with it.
Boom Supersonic inked a $1.25 billion agreement with a developer called Crusoe, which is building a suite of data centers for the artificial-intelligence startup OpenAI. The turbine company agreed to provide Crusoe with 29 jet-engine gas turbines that the developer could position at data centers across the U.S.
The deal is just one example of developers and tech companies straining to find power sources for the data centers sprouting up nationwide. Meta’s data center in El Paso, Texas, will draw fuel from more than 800 different mobile mini-turbines. Meanwhile, the construction equipment company Caterpillar has supplied gas engines to a data center in West Virginia. And the developer Crusoe used “aeroderivative” turbines based on airplane models for its massive Stargate data-center campus in Abilene, Texas, where power demand is a whopping 1.2 gigawatts.
It’s not just the U.S. New proposed natural gas capacity has surged worldwide over the past year. The energy analysis firm Global Energy Monitor reports that projects totaling more than 1,000 gigawatts of gas-fired power are now in development worldwide — a roughly 31 percent jump in just the last year. The United States leads the pack, accounting for about a quarter of that pipeline. More than a third of the new U.S. capacity will power data centers. The analysis also notes that two-thirds of gas project developers in the U.S. have yet to identify who will manufacture their natural gas turbines.
This rush to build out natural gas generation will have serious consequences for the climate. Early boosters of the data center boom suggested that new AI facilities would draw power from renewable sources such as solar and wind farms. While that has happened in some cases, developers are also rapidly locking in years of additional fossil fuel usage. An analysis from researchers at Cornell University found that the build-out could add as much as 44 million metric tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere by 2030, equivalent to the annual emissions of around 10 million passenger cars.
“This is a huge proposed build-out,” said Cara Fogler, deputy director of research, strategy, and analysis at the nonprofit Sierra Club, which has been tracking gas plant expansions by utilities. “Existing coal that’s not coming offline and planned gas that’s trying to come online are potentially boxing out clean energy.”
As Silicon Valley’s AI boom drives demand for ever more computing power, data center developers have struggled to keep up, largely because securing the massive amounts of electricity needed to run these facilities has become so difficult. The rush has led to long wait times to secure power from traditional utilities. As a result, developers and tech companies are increasingly taking matters into their own hands by generating power on-site. According to an analysis by Cleanview, a data firm tracking the energy transition, at least 46 data centers with a combined capacity of 56 gigawatts — equivalent to that of roughly 27 Hoover Dams — are using this “behind-the-meter” approach, as it’s known in industry parlance.
The chief executive of Bloom Energy, a startup that builds behind-the-meter fuel cells for data centers, said in a recent call with investors that the startup’s order backlog has more than doubled over the past year.
“On-site power has moved from being a decision of last resort to a vital business necessity,” said company executive K.R. Sridhar. He noted that while most of the company’s previous business was in states like California with high electricity costs, now “states where we are growing fastest have robust natural gas infrastructure and favorable regulatory and policy frameworks for on-site power generation.”
Ron Jenkins / Getty Images
One of those states is Texas, which is the epicenter of the build-out so far. Unconventional gas power will anchor campuses like that of Titus Low Carbon Ventures, which is building half a dozen data center parks across the Lone Star State. In September, the company signed a deal with power developer Gruppo AB to source Jennbacher gas generating engines, each of which provides just a few megawatts of power. The company will plug in hundreds of these boxy generators to provide baseload power alongside solar and wind.
“We could’ve elected to go with gas turbines,” said Jeff Ferguson, the president of Titus, in an interview with Grist. Instead of sourcing traditional gas turbines, he opted to buy “reciprocating engines,” which are smaller gas-powered generators that are similar to passenger car engines.
“We think that reciprocating engines are a better solution for data centers,” he said, adding that ”the difference is in the ability to manage transient loads,” or rapid fluctuations in power demand that are very common at the facilities.
Not only is it unlikely that 200 generators will ever go offline all at once, but the engines are also much faster to start up and stop than turbines — they can come online in around a minute, as opposed to an hour for a traditional power plant. Ferguson likened it to the difference between accelerating in a Corvette and a jet plane.
But experts say these substitute gas sources are even worse for the climate than traditional power plants, which use more efficient combined-cycle turbines that employ both gas and steam. The worst offenders are not turbines at all but rather internal-combustion engines like the ones in most automobiles.
“Internal combustion [engines] have better ramp up/down time[s] but are less efficient when compared to a gas turbine,” said Jenny Martos, a researcher who runs the gas plant tracker for Global Energy Monitor. “All gas power technologies produce emissions, but generally engines produce more emissions than the others.”
Texas has almost 58 gigawatts of natural gas power in various stages of planning and construction, according to the latest estimates from Global Energy Monitor. That’s more than the next four states combined, and more than every country on Earth except for China. Nearly half of the power plants under construction in Texas will provide power exclusively to data centers, without connecting to regional energy grids. These projects span the state, from OpenAI’s Stargate campus in central Abilene to Meta’s data center in El Paso, where the company has contracted with a Houston-based microgrid developer to set up 813 modular generators.
The projects are also popping up in rural areas of the country with few other economic development prospects. A developer called BorderPlex is proposing a $165 billion data center campus called Project Jupiter in southern New Mexico, powered by two microgrids that operate on simple-cycle gas turbines, which just burn gas to generate energy without capturing and deploying their waste heat. The project’s 2,880 megawatts of generation are more than the entire generation capacity of central New Mexico’s main utility.
“I’ve never seen something quite this big before, dollar-wise, scale-wise,” said Colin Cox, an attorney with the Center for Biological Diversity, which is opposing the project. “To call this a microgrid defies common sense.” Remaining behind the meter allows the project to avoid seeking approval from regulators who would enforce compliance with the state’s climate laws — even though Project Jupiter’s carbon emissions alone could outweigh the actions that New Mexico has taken to lower emissions over the past several years.
The project’s developer has promised jobs and tax revenue to rural Doña Ana County, but the future is murky. It remains unclear whether demand for artificial intelligence products will keep up with the historic capital expenditures being made by companies like OpenAI. If the bubble were to pop, the state would be left with a gas turbine that didn’t serve any users — an asset that the state would not need and that, under its climate laws, it would not be allowed to use.
“They’ll just be stranded assets,” said Cox. “You can’t do anything with a gas turbine besides run gas through it to make it spin.”
