I was reading post after post about the power crisis hitting AI data centers—GPU racks sitting idle, waiting not on chips, but on electricity. I texted with Sam Altman—who confirmed power was indeed a major constraint. I pinged our engineering team—and found that they already had the outline of a plan to build a power turbine based on our Symphony supersonic engine.
Today, we’re announcing Superpower, our new 42‑megawatt natural gas turbine, along with a $300M funding round and Crusoe as our launch customer. And most importantly: this marks a turning point. Boom is now on a self-funded path to both Superpower and the Overture supersonic airliner.
Blake Scholl, Founder & CEO, Boom Supersonic
Speaking of companies sidestepping their founding mission and jumping into short-term diversions to make a quick buck, here is the supposed trailblazer in supersonic aviation pivoting to energy generation for AI data centers. The tone of the announcement feels frantic, almost desperate for an ounce of relevance in a time when almost every company under the sun is scrambling to fit AI into their strategy – or at least their investor reports. The bit about the engineering team already having plans for a power turbine strikes me as quite odd as well: so, you’re telling me as a CEO you had no idea what your main engineers were working on!? And they were in fact not working on the airplane that should be your core product!?
To be fair, some of the advantages he names further down in the announcement sound like genuine improvements over regular turbines – but I’m no expert, so this could all be just marketing to sell the idea to Sam Altman. Naturally, nobody in the US seems to spend a minute contemplating climate change and the impact of expanding fossil fuel utilization. That point aside, it’s terrible tunnel vision to correctly identify a shortage of electricity and to arrive at this single solution when there are numerous alternatives out there. If you cared so much about expanding energy production, perhaps you should try to persuade president Trump not to shut down nearly finished offshore wind projects based on made-up ‘national security concerns’.
I never had much faith in the supersonic revival that the media tour back in 2022 tried to portray because the market for it seemed too narrow, limited almost entirely to ultra-rich blowhards wanting something extraordinary to flaunt their obscene wealth. This made me wonder on the implications for innovation of extreme income inequality – the so-called K-shaped economy, of a handful of people controlling most funds, both for expenditure and investing. The most impactful innovations of the past century – think the personal computer and the smartphone, but the automobile and commercial aviation as well – became groundbreaking not only because of technological leaps, but also thanks to wide distribution, which sustained the original invention through miniaturization and lowering of manufacturing costs. That in turn was made possible by a robust middle class who afforded to buy a car or two, to get their teenage kids a PC to start experimenting with coding, and later smartphones for all the family.
Would that have happened at all if most of the disposable income were sequestered in a tiny slice of the population like in feudal times? Almost certainly not, because all those functions would have been fulfilled by servants, and the lords would have little need to pick up a smartphone or invent the Internet. And yet, we’re sliding towards a similar societal structure with tech barons at the top and everyone else fighting for scraps in their shadow. If companies focus on a tiny but exclusive clientele, building elaborate and increasingly expensive products, they will find it more difficult to scale those down to a general public with dwindling disposable incomes, and so many ideas may end up failing on the drawing board.
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