Crusoe Abandons £931 Million Boom Supersonic Turbine Deal for AI Data Centres

Crusoe, the American AI infrastructure company, has walked away from a proposed arrangement to buy 29 stationary gas turbines from Boom Supersonic — a deal that had been valued at around £931 million. TechCrunch reported the collapse on 25 September 2026.

The turbines, each rated at 42 megawatts, would have provided roughly 1.21 gigawatts of generating capacity across Crusoe’s sites, including its data centre in Abilene, Texas. First deliveries had been expected in 2027.

A Big Bet That Didn’t Land

Boom Supersonic is best known for building supersonic passenger jets. But in December 2025, it announced it would sell a stationary version of its turbine engine — branded Superpower — to generate electricity for data centres. The Crusoe arrangement was meant to be the launch partnership for that new business.

It no longer is.

Blake Scholl, chief executive of Boom Supersonic, said the turbines were no longer part of Crusoe’s near-term primary power mix at Abilene or its other locations. That’s a frank admission from the man who had positioned Boom’s Superpower turbine as the foundation of an entirely new product line — speaking here about Crusoe’s decision from the supplier’s perspective, not as a Crusoe representative.

What Crusoe Says

Crusoe’s position is that nothing fundamental has changed. Andrew Schmitt, a company spokesperson, said the company’s wider energy plans remained intact and that it still planned to use turbines — just not Boom’s turbines.

The company said it wanted the freedom to draw power from a mix of sources: turbines, wind, solar, batteries, and the electricity grid. That kind of flexibility matters when you’re trying to power some of the most energy-hungry computing facilities on earth and the technology landscape is shifting fast.

So this isn’t Crusoe stepping back from gas turbines entirely. It’s Crusoe stepping back from this particular turbine, from this particular supplier.

Boom’s Position

Boom was measured in its public response. The company said other customers remained in its pipeline after the Crusoe arrangement ended, and Scholl has pointed to a target of delivering around 250 megawatts of Superpower turbines to those other customers in 2027. The longer-term ambition is 1 gigawatt of deliveries in 2028.

Whether Boom can hit those numbers without its flagship launch partner is an open question. The end of the Crusoe deal is, at minimum, a setback for a product that had only just been announced to the world nine months earlier.

The Bigger Picture: AI’s Power Problem

Strip away the corporate detail and what you’re left with is a story about electricity. AI data centres consume enormous amounts of power, and the grid — in the United States, the United Kingdom, and across Europe — is struggling to keep up with demand. Companies like Crusoe are under pressure to find reliable, dispatchable generation that can be built quickly and placed close to their facilities.

Gas turbines have appeal precisely because they can run on demand, unlike solar or wind, which depend on weather. But they come with emissions, fuel-supply questions, and planning hurdles. Battery storage helps smooth intermittent renewables but can’t yet replace a gas turbine’s round-the-clock output.

The decision by Crusoe to keep its options open — rather than commit to a single technology from a single supplier — reflects how uncertain the energy market for AI infrastructure really is. New power technologies are being pitched at data-centre operators almost daily, and the gap between a promising announcement and a working power plant is considerable.

Boom’s Superpower turbine is still a relatively new concept, adapted from an aircraft propulsion design for a completely different purpose. That kind of technology pivot takes time, and data-centre operators running on tight build schedules may not want to be first in the queue.

What This Means for Kent Residents

There’s no direct link between this deal and Kent — no Crusoe or Boom facility is planned in the county, and no local jobs or contracts were tied to the arrangement. But the story does matter to anyone in Britain who uses the internet, streams video, or relies on cloud services. The scramble to power AI data centres is putting pressure on electricity grids across the Western world, and how that pressure is managed — through new gas generation, renewables, or grid upgrades — will shape energy bills and network reliability for households and businesses here in Kent as much as anywhere else.