Elon Musk said SpaceX can cut turbine lead times by up to 18 months by casting the blades and vanes in-house at a secret foundry in Bastrop, Texas. He made the claim on Saturday, after earlier reporting had already pointed to a new blades-and-vanes operation tied to SpaceX.
In his post, Musk wrote that SpaceX and Tesla are each building 100GW/year of solar production capacity as fast as possible, but that natural gas will still be needed for several years to supplement and bootstrap solar. He said the bottleneck for turbine production is the casting of blades and vanes, the parts that have to withstand the hottest section of the machine.
Corey Trinetti in Bastrop
Corey Trinetti, a due diligence specialist and newsletter author, said SpaceX bought roughly 830 acres near its existing Starlink factory in Bastrop between March and June. Earlier in the day on Saturday, The Information published a report citing job listings that explicitly mentioned a blades and vanes foundry. Together, those details pointed to a manufacturing buildout before Musk spelled out the purpose himself.
The practical question for buyers of new gas-fired capacity is whether the new SpaceX operation can actually reach industrial scale. Musk said it can accelerate natural gas turbines coming online by up to 18 months, but that depends on a process that is tightly controlled and hard to duplicate.
GE Vernova Through 2030
The constraint is not simple metalwork. Each blade has to be cast as a single, unbroken crystal grown slowly inside a vacuum furnace, and the blades in power-plant turbines are larger than those used in jet engines. The hottest-section blades run at 3,000 to 3,600 degrees Fahrenheit, roughly 800 degrees hotter than the melting point of the metal alloy they are made from.
Only four companies worldwide have mastered that casting process well enough to produce these blades at industrial scale. A Musk-controlled company would be entering a market where GE Vernova says it is essentially sold out of production capacity through 2030, largely because of AI infrastructure demand. The International Energy Agency projects global data center electricity use will roughly double by 2030.
That is why private gas-fired plants next to data centers have become a strategy used by Amazon, Google, Meta, OpenAI, and Microsoft. If SpaceX can turn a secret foundry into steady output, it would add a new source of turbine parts to a supply chain that the AI buildout is already stretching thin.
