SpaceX to Cast Gas Turbine Components In-House, Targeting 18-Month Acceleration

SpaceX is moving to manufacture natural gas turbine blades and vanes internally, a step Elon Musk says could accelerate new turbine capacity by up to 18 months. Musk disclosed the plan today, framing in-house casting as a way to break the single biggest bottleneck in bringing gas turbines online amid a looming data center power shortage.

Musk said SpaceX is building 100GW per year of solar production capacity as fast as possible, but that natural gas will still be needed to supplement and bootstrap solar for several years. The limiting factor for gas turbine production, he said, is casting the blades and vanes, a constraint SpaceX intends to solve by doing the casting itself.

Musk foreshadowed the move in a recent podcast with Dwarkesh Patel. Turbines are sold out through 2030, he said, and to bring enough power online, SpaceX and Tesla will probably have to make the turbine blades and vanes internally. He noted there are only three casting companies in the world that make these components, and that they are massively backlogged.

The turbine push follows SpaceX's acquisition in May 2026 of APR Energy, a Jacksonville-based company that owns and operates one of the world's largest fleets of mobile gas turbines. The deal was valued at around $1 billion. The assets include roughly 30 to 38 trailer-mounted GE TM2500 aeroderivative turbines, each rated at about 33 to 35 MW, plus supporting equipment, for a total capacity of more than 1 GW.

These units run on natural gas or diesel, can be trucked to a site, commissioned in weeks, and reach full power in minutes. The capability allows SpaceX to bypass slow utility grid interconnection queues and rapidly power energy-hungry computing clusters such as xAI's Colossus.

Musk characterized the in-house casting decision as a profound game-changer and a bold bet to solve the coming data center power shortage by making gas turbine components himself. He framed the broader effort as part of a race to convert capital into watts, watts into compute, and compute into intelligence faster than everyone else. The news, he indicated, is a clear signal that SpaceX will build whatever is needed to avoid being supply constrained.

What comes next centers on how quickly SpaceX can stand up its in-house casting operations and translate that capacity into turbines coming online, against Musk's stated target of accelerating delivery by up to 18 months.