Data Centers Are Running on Rebuilt Jet Engines While They Wait for Grid Power

SeaPRwire – Eight rebuilt jet engines are now generating electricity in Mississippi for a data center in Memphis, according to state permits and satellite imagery reviewed by the New York Times. The units came out of retired aircraft and were converted to burn natural gas by ProEnergy, which reworks a General Electric engine commonly fitted to Boeing jets.

They belong to xAI’s Colossus 2 site. OpenAI took the same route in 2025 at its first Stargate campus in Abilene, Texas, and Crusoe, the Denver company building that campus, ordered 13 of ProEnergy’s converted units in April.

The reason is arithmetic. Connecting 100 megawatts to the grid in Northern Virginia takes about seven years, by the International Energy Agency’s estimate. A converted jet engine can have a data center running in 24 months, Rystad Energy analyst Audun Martinsen told the Times. “It’s all about getting power as fast as possible,” he said.

Most new generating capacity is not expected to arrive until 2031, an executive at Mitsubishi Power told Bloomberg last week. Mitsubishi Power is one of the largest makers of power generation equipment, and its order book is a reasonable proxy for how long everyone else will wait.

A seven-year wait does not fit inside a data center’s build schedule.

Gas turbines have one property that matters in that situation: output is dispatchable. A site can start them when the load arrives and shut them down when it does not, which is what a campus full of accelerators needs. A grid connection offers the same thing at a lower price, and that is the entire reason anyone stands in the queue.

The queue is not only for grid connections. The Times report puts new turbines in the same line as interconnection requests, which is why operators are buying rebuilt engines from an aftermarket supplier instead of ordering a gas plant. Orders placed with the large equipment makers now run to the end of the decade.

Geography supplies another clue. The load is in Memphis and the generation is in Mississippi, a state line away, which is where the permits were filed. Power does not have to be generated where it is consumed, and a converted engine can be placed close enough to a campus to avoid the transmission question altogether.

The queue has already changed decisions. Nscale’s data center in Loughton, England, lost its anchor customer after the local utility said it could not deliver enough power until the early to mid-2030s, and the customer was Microsoft.

What the engines are not is a power plant. Nobody involved describes them as permanent. They are less efficient than turbines built for conventional gas plants, they emit more per unit of electricity, and they take more units to produce the same output, according to the Times.

That combination points to a short life. Some experts told the Times that efficiency and emissions will matter more in a year or two, once the first wave of sites is running and the comparison with grid power becomes concrete.

More units for the same output changes the operating model as well as the footprint. A single 100-megawatt connection is one contract with one utility; a bank of converted engines is a fleet, each unit with its own maintenance interval, fuel supply and emissions limit. Operators who buy them take on work a power company normally does, at a site that was planned as a computer building.

The Times’ account rests on state permits and satellite imagery, not on company announcements. That says something about how this capacity is arriving: as permitted equipment recorded site by site, rather than as a power strategy anyone chose to describe.

The commercial history of the last two months suggests the market is still searching for the right machine. In September, Crusoe walked away from a $1.25 billion agreement to buy 29 natural gas turbines from Boom Supersonic, a startup developing a supersonic passenger jet that has also begun selling a version of that engine as a data center power source. A Crusoe spokesperson said at the time that the company still intended to use turbines.

Crusoe’s retreat from the Boom order is the clearest sign that buyers are still comparing designs. Boom was selling a derivative of a supersonic jet engine, ProEnergy sells a rebuilt airliner engine, and neither is a standard product with a published price list. That is why the contracts are large, bespoke and easy to unwind.

Nothing in the public record says what these units cost per megawatt, how much carbon they emit compared with a grid connection, or how many are installed across the industry. The New York Times count of eight at one site is a data point, not a total.

The constraint being worked around is time, and the fuel is the least interesting part of the story. A gas turbine is a known quantity. A grid interconnection queue is not: it depends on transmission capacity, on the utility’s own construction schedule, and on whether a state regulator approves the cost allocation. Those are the variables that decide when a data center can switch on.

Building behind the meter removes them from the critical path. It also transfers risk to the operator, who now owns generation, fuel supply and emissions permitting on top of servers. For a company racing to bring GPUs online, that trade has looked acceptable.

The grid is not standing still. Capacity is being added, and the 2031 figure describes the bulk of it rather than the first megawatts. Sites that can wait will wait, because grid power is cheaper per kilowatt-hour and comes with someone else’s maintenance crew.

Two things would turn the engines into something more than a stopgap. One is a connection that arrives later than promised, which is the pattern the 2031 estimate implies. The other is a campus already built around a substation that does not exist yet, at which point the turbines stop being a bridge and become the power supply.

How long the converted engines stay in service depends on two clocks running at different speeds: the time it takes to energize a substation, and the time it takes for a rival to ship a model that makes an existing cluster obsolete. If the second is shorter, the engines may never be replaced at all. They will simply be decommissioned with the hardware they were bought to power.

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