Some AI data center builders have found a way around long waits for electricity. They are using old jet engines, pulled from retired planes and rebuilt to run on natural gas, the New York Times reported on Tuesday.
The engines are not meant to be permanent power plants. Companies are using them because grid connections and new turbines can take years to arrive.
Months Instead of Years
Speed is the main reason companies are choosing these units. “It’s all about getting power as fast as possible,” Rystad Energy analyst Audun Martinsen told the Times.
Martinsen said that with jet-powered units, companies “can have a data center running in 24 months.” That timeline is far shorter than the wait for a standard grid hookup in some areas.
In Northern Virginia, connecting 100 megawatts to the grid takes about seven years, according to the International Energy Agency. That is more than three times as long as the timeline Martinsen described.
New turbines are also hard to get. An executive at Mitsubishi Power, one of the world’s top makers of power generation equipment, told Bloomberg last week that most power capacity is expected to come on by 2031.
The delays are already affecting deals. Last month, Microsoft pulled out as the anchor customer for Nscale’s data center in Loughton, England. The local utility had said it could not deliver enough power until the early to mid-2030s.
Who Is Using the Engines
Elon Musk’s xAI is among the companies already using converted jet engines. It installed eight of the turbines in Mississippi to help power its Colossus 2 data center in Memphis, the Times reported, citing state permits and satellite imagery.
The units come from ProEnergy. The company rebuilds a GE engine that is commonly found on Boeing jets.
OpenAI took a similar path in 2025 with gas turbines at its first Stargate site in Abilene, Texas. Crusoe, a Denver-based startup that builds AI data centers, is constructing that campus.
Crusoe ordered 13 of ProEnergy’s converted units in April. In September, it walked away from a $1.25 billion deal to buy 29 natural gas turbines from Boom Supersonic.
Boom Supersonic is developing a supersonic passenger jet and has also started selling a version of that jet’s engine as a power plant for data centers. A Crusoe spokesperson told TechCrunch at the time that the company still plans to use turbines.
The Trump administration is also adding pressure on the industry. It has encouraged data centers to generate their own electricity.
The engines come with trade-offs. They are less efficient and pollute more than turbines built for standard gas plants, according to the Times.
It also takes more converted engines to produce the same amount of power. Some experts said efficiency and environmental concerns may become more important in a year or two, which could make the engines a short-term fix.
