Elon Musk confirmed on Saturday that a secret foundry SpaceX has been building in Bastrop, Texas, is intended to cast the blades and vanes used in gas turbines, addressing a critical manufacturing bottleneck that he claims can accelerate natural gas turbine deployment by up to 18 months. The confirmation came in response to a report from The Information, which cited job listings and findings from due diligence specialist Corey Trinetti showing that SpaceX had purchased roughly 830 acres near its existing Starlink factory in Bastrop between March and June for a “blades and vanes foundry.”

Musk’s move targets a second major constraint facing AI infrastructure: the physical power grid. The International Energy Agency projects global data center electricity use will roughly double by 2030, and GE Vernova, a major gas turbine manufacturer, reports it is essentially sold out of production capacity through 2030 largely because of AI demand. Hyperscalers including Amazon, Google, Meta, OpenAI, and Microsoft are already building private gas-fired plants next to data centers rather than waiting for grid upgrades.

The casting bottleneck is extraordinarily hard to bypass. According to The Information, turbine blades in the hottest section operate at 3,000–3,600° F, about 800° F above the melting point of the metal alloy they are made from. They rely on internal cooling channels, thermal-barrier coatings, and a single-crystal casting process grown slowly inside a vacuum furnace without microscopic seams. Only four companies worldwide produce such blades at industrial scale, and all are tapped out. The difficulty is compounded by the fact that blades for power-plant turbines are much larger than those used in jet engines, making defect-free production even harder.

If SpaceX succeeds, it would give a Musk-controlled entity a manufacturing capability that the rest of the AI infrastructure industry currently depends on a tiny oligopoly for, providing SpaceXAI an edge that well-funded but non-manufacturing competitors cannot quickly replicate.

But the article also details mounting environmental and legal pushback against gas turbines already in operation. In Memphis, where SpaceXAI has run turbines since 2024 to power its Colossus data centers, the NAACP has repeatedly alleged that the company operates without required permits or pollution controls. The turbines emit smog-forming compounds and hazardous chemicals such as formaldehyde, linked to asthma, respiratory disease, and certain cancers. University of Memphis researchers found air pollution grew “slightly worse” in neighborhoods already burdened by industrial emissions.

A separate case in Virginia’s “Data Center Alley” was analyzed using the EPA’s COBRA health-impact model in a study commissioned by the Piedmont Environmental Council. It found that emissions from a single facility’s eight full-time gas turbines could reach more than 2.5 million people across multiple counties, with the heaviest impact on marginalized communities, and cause an estimated 3.4 to 6.5 additional premature deaths per year, translating to $53 million to $99 million in annual health-related damages. The pattern of local opposition and lawsuits is widespread.