AI data centers power up with converted jet engines as grid waits stretch to years

AI data centers facing multi-year waits for grid electricity are increasingly making their own power with jet engines salvaged from retired aircraft and rebuilt to burn natural gas. That is the finding of a New York Times report covered by TechCrunch, and it illustrates the widening gap between electricity supply and the pace of AI data center construction.

Speed is the whole point

Nobody mistakes an aircraft engine for a purpose-built power plant, and the companies adopting them know it. What the hardware offers is deployment speed. Audun Martinsen, an analyst at Rystad Energy, told the Times that the calculation comes down to getting electricity as quickly as possible, and that with jet-based units "they can have a data center running in 24 months."

The alternative is far slower. According to the International Energy Agency, connecting 100 megawatts to the grid in Northern Virginia takes roughly seven years. An executive at Mitsubishi Power, one of the world's largest makers of generation equipment, told Bloomberg that most new power capacity is not expected to come online until 2031.

Delays are already costing business

The queues are not a hypothetical problem. According to TechCrunch, Microsoft pulled out as the anchor customer for Nscale's planned data center in Loughton, England after the local utility said it could not deliver enough power until the early-to-mid 2030s.

Who is using the engines

xAI has installed eight converted jet-engine 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, a company that rebuilds a GE engine commonly found on Boeing jets.

OpenAI followed suit in 2025, using gas turbines at its first Stargate site in Abilene, Texas. Crusoe, the Denver-based startup building that campus, ordered 13 of ProEnergy's converted units in April. Crusoe also walked away in September from a $1.25 billion deal to buy 29 natural gas turbines from Boom Supersonic, a supersonic-jet developer that has begun selling a power-plant version of its engine. A Crusoe spokesperson told TechCrunch the company still plans to use turbines.

Policy is pushing in the same direction. As TechCrunch notes, the Trump administration is encouraging data centers to generate their own electricity, adding to the pressure on operators to find off-grid solutions.

A stopgap with real trade-offs

The drawbacks are significant. According to the Times, converted jet engines are less efficient and pollute more than turbines designed for conventional gas plants, and it takes more of them to produce the same amount of power. Some experts expect efficiency and environmental concerns to grow in importance within a year or two, which suggests the engines are a bridge strategy rather than a lasting one.

Why it matters

The story is less about aviation hardware than about the physical limits now shaping the AI industry. Compute is no longer the binding constraint; electricity is. When a major operator can lose an anchor tenant because of a utility timeline, or shave years off a project by installing aircraft engines on site, the pace of AI expansion is effectively being set by grid queues and turbine backlogs rather than model releases. The likely consequences are more on-site fossil generation, higher effective costs and emissions per megawatt, and growing scrutiny of the industry's energy footprint until new grid capacity arrives around 2031.