A supersonic engine core makes the perfect power turbine
134 comments
·December 9, 2025javascriptfan69
shrubble
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.
_carbyau_
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.
javascriptfan69
I think a 42MW turbine might run into some permitting issues regarding safe noise levels.
shtzvhdx
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.
BostonEnginerd
Jealous sitting here in MA, where we pay $0.35/kWh and burn a ton of methane to get that.
jjk166
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.
chii
> 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.
PunchyHamster
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
nickff
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).
King-Aaron
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.
deadeye
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.
lovemenot
Are you arguing that USA can no longer build parking lots due to environmental concerns? If so, that would indeed be remarkable since parking lots seem to be the facility that almost every US town has been able to build more than enough of.
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fyrn_
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
dzonga
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.
pfdietz
Turbines are useful even in a 100% renewable powered world.
gridspy
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.
rgmerk
It's not clear (yet) what a 100% clean energy powered world would use to cover the last couple of percent of demand when loads peak and/or variable generation troughs for extended periods.
It'll be some combination of demand management (which isn't nearly as horrifying as people make it out to be), pumped hydro, long-duration batteries like iron-air, but also possibly burning hydrogen or hydrogen-derived synthetic fuels (produced by electrolysis when hydrogen is abundant) and/or biofuels in turbines.
mannykannot
Particularly with the development of fracking, natural gas production is no longer a just a byproduct of oil production, and can be (and is) pursued independently. Nevertheless, I agree that we developing renewables should be our priority.
marze
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.
AuthAuth
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.
nandomrumber
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.
seanmcdirmid
They are replacing old coal plants with more efficient cleaner designers. National security wise they still have lots of coal to work with, while most renewable energy is generated in the west where ongoing grid upgrades are needed to use it where people live (in the east).
pfdietz
Coal consumption has peaked there. Solar is growing explosively.
AuthAuth
Dont you think its a bit naive to be saying something peaked when it hasnt even been a year?
specialist
Yes and:
Recent Volts episode has great overview of China's electro-tech build out, world is at or near peak fossil fuel across all sectors and countries (with 1 notable exception), etc.
Clean electrification is inevitable - A conversation with Kingsmill Bond of Ember Energy. [2025/11/21]
bradfa
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?
fpoling
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.
seanmcdirmid
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.
johnsmith1840
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.
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bob1029
> 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.
pwarner
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...
stephen_g
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.
mNovak
I'm guessing it's not just the overhead lines, but you need the actual power plants somewhere.
gjrq
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.
mNovak
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?
gjrq
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.
namirez
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.
jb_rad
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.
ggm
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.
kreelman
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.
pdx_flyer
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.
ggm
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.
kristianp
> 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.
tintor
How much pollution would this generate?
tikimcfee
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.
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?