Boom Supersonic raises $300 million to build natural gas turbines for Crusoe data centers

Airplane startup Boom Supersonic said Tuesday that it will begin selling a version of its turboprop engine as a stationary power plant, and that its first customer will be data center startup Crusoe.

Crusoe will buy 29 of the 42-megawatt Boom turbines for $1.25 billion to generate 1.21 gigawatts for its data centers. Boom said it will announce more details about the turbine factory next year, with the first deliveries taking place in 2027.

To commercialize its Superpower stationary turbine, Boom raised $300 million in a round led by Darsana Capital Partners with participation from Altimeter Capital, Ark Invest, Bessemer Venture Partners, Robinhood Ventures and Y Combinator.

Blake Scholl, founder and CEO of Boom, told TechCrunch that profits from the sale of Superpower units will go toward funding the continued development of the company’s supersonic aircraft.

It’s an arrangement that Scholl likens to SpaceX’s Starlink satellite constellation. The satellite internet service is said to be profitable, helping the company finance the development of its rockets.

“I’ve been keeping my eyes open for 10 years for what our Starlink could be,” he said. “I’ve said no to thousands of things because I concluded they were just distractions. And this is one thing we say yes to because it’s so clearly on the right path.”

Boom said the Superpower and its airborne engine called Symphony share 80% of their parts. Earlier this year, Boom’s XB-1 experimental aircraft was the first civilian aircraft developed by a private company to break the sound barrier.

Crusoe pays $1,033 per kilowatt of generating capacity. For this, Boom will deliver turbines, generators, control systems and preventive maintenance. Crusoe will have to provide everything else, including pollution control, electrical connections, etc.

This is on the higher side for this type of power plant. A typical aircraft-derived — or aero-derived — turbine costs about $1,600 per kilowatt, a price that also includes pollution control, engineering, construction, land acquisition, permits, pipelines, and more.

In a typical project, turbines and pollution controls contribute about 46% of the total project cost. Applying this ratio to Boom’s numbers would likely bring the total cost to more than $2,000 per kilowatt. This is expensive for simple cycle gas turbines and is more in line with the costs of combined cycle gas turbines scheduled to be operational in the early 2030s.

Boom’s Superpower targets 39% efficiency, similar to competitors. Combined cycle turbines can recover heat from the exhaust to boost efficiency by more than 60%.

Boom is also developing a “field upgrade” to convert its turbines from simple to combined cycle, Scholl said. Operators can do this today with existing combined cycle kits, although adding them will require longer installation times. “These combined cycle plants tend to be construction projects,” he said.

Like other wind turbine generators, Superpower will be delivered in a shipping container, and developers like Crusoe will be responsible for electrical and gas connections as well as pollution control.

Scholl said the power plants shouldn’t be “louder” than existing wind turbines, though that’s not exactly quiet: Residents near XAI’s Colossus data center have reported hearing similar-sized turbines from at least a half-mile away.

The first few fixed turbines will be manufactured at Boom’s existing facilities while the company builds a larger plant. The goal is to produce 1 GW in 2028, 2 GW in 2029, and 4 GW in 2030. If Boom can reach these numbers, it would represent a significant expansion of turbines available for deployment.

Boom still has a few tough years ahead of him. If the company can achieve this, commercial supersonic flights could occur sooner than Bohm expects. But scaling up production is never easy, and many startups have struggled to cross the valley of death that separates early-stage hardware companies from their commercial counterparts.