SpaceX is building a specialised in-house foundry in Texas to manufacture high-specification gas turbine blades and vanes, as the company looks to address a key bottleneck in power generation needed to meet rising electricity demand from artificial intelligence (AI) data centres.
SpaceX CEO Elon Musk confirmed the plan on social media platform X, saying the company and Tesla are working to scale solar panel production but natural gas would remain necessary to meet power requirements for several years.
“The limiting factor for nat gas turbine production is casting the blades & vanes,” Musk said. “By doing in-house casting at SpaceX, we can accelerate nat gas turbines coming online by up to 18 months, which is a profound game-changer.”
A turbine blade foundry is a specialised manufacturing facility that uses advanced casting techniques to produce high-precision blades and vanes used in gas turbines for power generation, as well as in aerospace and aviation applications.
The planned facility will be located in Bastrop, about 48 km east of Austin, adjacent to an existing Starlink manufacturing plant. SpaceX quietly acquired about 830 acres of land in the area between March and June this year.
The expansion comes as the US faces a shortage of specialised turbine components, contributing to delays in bringing new power-generation capacity online for energy-intensive AI data centres.
Morgan Stanley analyst Adam Jonas noted in an August report that Raptor turbine pump castings and turbine airfoil components used in data centres rely on the same alloys and furnaces. This could allow a single foundry to spread its fixed costs across SpaceX’s aerospace operations and the growing AI infrastructure market.
The Bastrop facility is expected to produce single-crystal nickel-superalloy components designed to withstand extreme temperatures ranging from 1,650 degrees Celsius to 1,980 degrees Celsius in the hot sections of turbines.
Specialised foundries worldwide that can manufacture such components are reportedly booked through 2029-30, contributing to backlogs in energy projects across the US.
SpaceX has not announced a target date for the facility to become operational. State environmental regulatory filings for the site are also pending.
-PTI
