Crusoe Drops $1.25 Billion Effort to Use Boom Turbines at AI Data Centers

AI infrastructure developer walks away from launch partnership for Boom Supersonic's Superpower turbines, but says gas power remains part of its strategy

Crusoe has ended its planned $1.25 billion agreement to deploy 29 of Boom Supersonic's Superpower natural gas turbines at its AI data centers, removing the launch customer from Boom's new stationary power business just months before deliveries were expected to begin .

Boom CEO Blake Scholl confirmed the breakup in a post on X on September 25, saying the turbines "are no longer part of Crusoe's near-term primary power mix at Abilene/etc., so a launch partnership just doesn't make sense" . Crusoe spokesperson Andrew Schmitt told TechCrunch that the company's energy plans "haven't changed" and that it still intends to use turbines, "just not Boom's" .

The Deal That Wasn't

The agreement, announced in December 2025, was intended to be the launch order for Boom's Superpower turbine — a 42-megawatt natural gas unit derived from the company's Symphony supersonic engine, sharing roughly 80% of its parts . Crusoe was to buy 29 units, totaling 1.21 gigawatts of generation capacity, at a reported cost of $1.25 billion. First deliveries were scheduled for 2027 .

Boom had positioned Superpower as a solution to one of the AI industry's most acute bottlenecks: the gap between the speed at which data centers can be built and the speed at which they can secure power. The turbine was designed to maintain full output above 110°F without water, a claimed advantage in hot regions like Texas where many AI campuses are being developed .

What Crusoe Is Doing Instead

Crusoe is not abandoning gas turbines — it is replacing Boom's with established suppliers. The company has existing orders for 29 GE Vernova LM2500XPRESS aeroderivative turbines, expected to provide nearly 1 gigawatt, and a June agreement with Bergen Engines covering about 750 megawatts through a 438-megawatt contract and a 310-megawatt letter of intent . It also has a contract with PROENERGY for 13 PE6000 turbine generator sets, each rated at 50 megawatts .

At its flagship Abilene campus built for Oracle and OpenAI, Crusoe uses grid power as the primary source with gas turbines for backup. A separate 900-megawatt Abilene site for Microsoft is being developed with dedicated on-site generation .

What Boom Loses

The loss of its launch customer is a significant setback for Boom's effort to diversify beyond supersonic aviation. The company raised $300 million in December 2025 largely to commercialize the turbine business, with Scholl saying at the time that profits from Superpower sales would help fund continued development of the Overture supersonic airliner .

Scholl said Boom still expects to deliver about 250 megawatts of Superpower units to other sites in 2027, with a target of 1 gigawatt in 2028 . But the departure of Crusoe removes both a major revenue source and, perhaps more importantly, a source of real-world operating data. As site-selection consultant John Boyd noted, the Crusoe deal would have provided "field reliability data of Superpower coming from the booming data center sector for use as a technology-validation platform for the supersonic aviation side of Boom's business" .

A Wider Signal

The canceled deal illustrates a broader reality in the AI infrastructure race: contracts do not automatically equal deployable megawatts. Financing, construction timelines, equipment delivery, and grid access are all shaping which projects actually come online . Texas paused new data-center grid approvals in August 2026 while regulators reviewed an interconnection queue exceeding 474 gigawatts of requested power .

The International Energy Agency's April 2026 update projected global data-center electricity use rising from 485 TWh in 2025 to 950 TWh in 2030, while noting that grid bottlenecks and equipment constraints are limiting the fastest expansion scenarios . For companies building AI capacity, securing the right power equipment from suppliers with proven delivery records is proving to matter as much as signing the initial contract.