“If you take that fan off and put a little bit extra turbine connected to an electric generator, the engine that would make 40,000 pounds of thrust on a supersonic jet makes 42 megawatts, which turns out, by luck, is the perfect size for a modular turbine that you can put in at a data center like bricks. … This is like blade servers of energy.”
The Social Radars · Startups & Venture · November 2026
Context
Scholl explains how Boom's supersonic jet engine became a power turbine for AI data centers, the new business funding the airliner. The 42-megawatt unit happens to suit modular data center power.
Transcript
Nice. And
now you have this huge revenue stream.
Yeah, or at least we will next year. So essentially the same engine, if you take the fan off the front that's there to like blow air back to push the airplane forward, like the fan's there for thrust. If you take that fan off and instead you put a little bit extra turbine connected into an electric generator, the engine that would make 40,000 pounds of thrust on a supersonic jet makes 42 megawatts, which turns out, again, by luck is like the perfect size for kind of a modular turbine that you can like put in at a data center like bricks. It's like, oh, you want like a gigawatt? That's 24 units. And you just gang them together.
Because you don't want it too big or too small. That's
right. Yeah. If it's too small, it's like you can't manage that many engines. It's too complicated and that you lose efficiency in the small end. If it's too big, it's very expensive to get enough redundancy. But if a medium-sized turbine, you can basically deploy them in N plus 1 arrays.…
you basically have to, you already probably knew what your whole production line was going to be because you were actually going to turn these engines into your flying airplanes. But did you have to call and be like, yeah, we're going to massively move up this timeline?
More from The Social Radars
