Stuck for years in queues for grid connections and new turbines, some AI data centers are generating their own electricity with converted jet engines, The New York Times reported Tuesday.
The engines, taken from retired planes and rebuilt to burn natural gas, are not anyone’s idea of a permanent power plant. But they are another sign of how far behind the power supply is the development of AI.
For companies stuck in these lines, the main appeal of converted jet engines is how quickly the engines can be operational. “It’s all about getting electricity as quickly as possible,” Audun Martinsen, an analyst at Rystad Energy, told the Times. With jet-powered units, “they can get a data center up and running in 24 months,” he said.
By comparison, connecting 100 megawatts to the Northern Virginia grid takes about seven years, according to the International Energy Agency. Most of the power capacity is expected to be operational by 2031, an executive at Mitsubishi Power, one of the world’s leading makers of power generation equipment, told Bloomberg last week.
In some cases, these delays are already costing some data center operators dearly. Last month, Microsoft withdrew as a primary customer from Nscale’s data center in Loughton, England, after the local utility said it could not supply enough power until the early to mid-2030s.
Elon Musk’s xAI is among the companies already using these engines, having installed eight converted jet engine turbines in Mississippi to help power its Colossus 2 data center in Memphis, the Times reported, citing state permits and satellite images. The units come from ProEnergy, which rebuilds a GE engine commonly found on Boeing planes.
In 2025, OpenAI followed Elon Musk’s lead with gas turbines at its first Stargate site in Abilene, Texas. Crusoe, a Denver-based startup that builds AI data centers, is building this Abilene campus and ordered 13 of the converted units from ProEnergy in April.
In September, Crusoe walked away from a $1.25 billion deal to buy 29 natural gas turbines from Boom Supersonic, a startup developing a supersonic jet that also began selling a version of that plane’s engine as a power plant for data centers. A Crusoe spokesperson told TechCrunch at the time that the company still planned to use turbines.
Currently, the Trump administration is adding to the pressure by encouraging data centers to generate their own electricity.
Converted jet engines, however, come with tradeoffs: They are less efficient and pollute more than turbines designed for conventional gas plants, and more of them are needed to produce the same amount of power, according to the Times. That could ultimately make converted jet engines a short-term play, with some experts saying efficiency and environmental concerns could gain prominence within a year or two.
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