Elon Musk has confirmed that a secretive foundry SpaceX has been building in Bastrop, Texas, is intended to manufacture the turbine blades and vanes used in natural gas power plants, a move aimed at overcoming a key bottleneck slowing the rollout of AI data centres. The disclosure came after The Information published a report, based on job listings and site research, revealing the facility's purpose; Musk responded on X, saying in-house casting could bring gas turbines online up to 18 months sooner. The plan matters because it would give a Musk-controlled business a manufacturing edge that rival AI infrastructure builders currently cannot replicate quickly, though it also raises concerns about the pollution associated with a faster build-out of gas turbines.

The bottleneck stems from the extreme difficulty of casting turbine blades, which must withstand temperatures of roughly 3,000 to 3,600°F — about 800 degrees above the melting point of the alloy itself — using single-crystal casting techniques performed in vacuum furnaces. Only four companies worldwide currently manufacture such blades at industrial scale, and all are said to be at full capacity, a shortage compounded by soaring electricity demand from data centres, which the International Energy Agency expects to roughly double globally by 2030. This has pushed major hyperscalers, including Amazon, Google, Meta, OpenAI and Microsoft, to build private gas-fired plants alongside data centres rather than wait for grid capacity, even as gas turbines already face lawsuits and health research linking them to pollution, including in Memphis.