alt Hacker NewsA supersonic engine core makes the perfect power turbine
Comments
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
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
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
"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!
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.
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.
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
Hmm curious as to how loud it will make the data center.
> About three months later, we had a signed deal for 1.21 gigawatts and had started manufacturing the first turbine.
Great Scott!
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.
1.21 jigowatts? Great Scott! the only power source capable of generating 1.21 gigawatts of electricity is a bolt of lightning
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.
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.
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.
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
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 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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?