Thread by @bscholl

A new product, a new customer, a new financing!

Introducing Superpower: a 42MW natural gas turbine optimized for AI datacenters, built on our supersonic technology. Superpower launches with a 1.21GW order from @CrusoeAI Backstory 🧵👇

1/ Three years ago when we started working on our Symphony supersonic engine, we knew that it would one day make for a breakthrough power turbine

2/ Back then, we registered some energy-related domains and put power on our product roadmap—but expected we'd ship supersonic first, then launch our energy product

3/ But we've watched an energy crisis develop in America. Our grid has flatlined while China has raced ahead. Hyperscalers have racks of GPUs sitting idle with no electricity to power them

4/ Like all great ideas, this started with reading X. As I was pushing to legalize supersonic, I kept hearing about how AI companies couldn't get enough electricity. Both XAi and OpenAI were building their own power plants with large arrays of converted jet engines

5/ There's something brilliant in this approach: large arrays of mid-size turbines are the blade servers of the energy world. Just as blade servers are more reliable and efficient than mainframes, so would be an array of turbines. But there was a major problem:

6/ The existing "aeroderivative" turbines were old technology—based literally on 1970s jet engines. This means they didn't perform well in the real world, had no cloud connectivity. Nonetheless, AI companies were snapping up all they could get... engines were effectively old out

7/ I texted @sama, who had been a Boom investor for more than a decade. Would a 42MW nat gas turbine be helpful? The answer was a resounding yes. 90 days later, we had a launch order for 1.21GW and well over $1.25B in backlog

8/ Later, we visited @CrusoeAI's data center in Abilene, TX, where they were building one of the first vertically integrated power plants. Many of the pads were sitting empty, waiting for big OEMs to deliver.

9/ Worse, it was 110°F that day—and the turbines took the heat even worse than the humans. With 1970s tech designed for subsonic flight—where effective temperatures are -50°, the only way to avoid a meltdown was to throttle back.

10/ Our engine was designed to run at Mach 1.7, where effective temperatures are 160°F. This means that under real world conditions, four of our Superpower turbines could do the job of seven legacy units. Without the cooling water required by legacy turbines!

11/ I believe our job @boomsupersonic is to tackle industrial scale product development that others can't or won't. No one else is building a supersonic airliner. No one else was building a new turbine. Even plans to ramp production of existing units were tepid.

12/ So we decided it was time to pull energy forward in our product roadmap. Shipping our engine first as a power turbine not only solves an acute customer and American paint point—it also solves the biggest problems facing supersonic flight.

13/ Today's new $300M financing fully funds the Superpower turbine—and Superpower accelerates profitability, allowing us to self-fund Overture supersonic development

14/ Additionally, Superpower provides a proving ground for our engine. When it carries passengers, we'll have hundreds of thousands of hours of real world experience, making it the most tested new jet engine ever to carry passengers.

15/ To overcome supply chain bottlenecks, we're vertically integrating manufacturing. We've already started building the first Superpower turbine, and we're building a new Superfactory in Denver which will make 2GW/year of turbines from raw materials

16/ We'll share more about the Superpower Superfactory early next year. It's time to build supersonic.