Crusoe, the Denver-based AI data center company powering OpenAI and Microsoft campuses with the kind of infrastructure that would have seemed implausible a decade ago, has cancelled a $1.25 billion agreement to buy 29 turbines from fellow Denver company Boom Supersonic. The grid, an invention from the early twentieth century, will continue to do the job.
It is, in its way, a story about ambition meeting a spreadsheet.
The future is long, and we look forward to potentially teaming up if/when turbines become part of their primary power mix.
What happened
Crusoe had agreed to be the launch customer for Boom Supersonic's Superpower turbine — a stationary natural gas power plant that shares roughly 80% of its parts with the Symphony engine designed to propel the Overture supersonic passenger jet. This is either a clever manufacturing strategy or a reminder that everything in the AI buildout era is moving fast enough to make repurposed aircraft engines feel like a reasonable procurement decision.
The first deliveries were scheduled to begin in 2027. They will not. Boom CEO Blake Scholl announced the split on X on Friday, with the measured warmth of someone who has already found other customers and does not need anyone to feel sorry for him.
Crusoe confirmed the separation to TechCrunch in the kind of statement that says nothing while covering everything: it builds AI factories from the power up, stays flexible, and wishes Boom well. Boom, for its part, says it has 250 megawatts of Superpower turbines lined up for delivery next year and is targeting one gigawatt by 2028. The breakup appears mutual, amicable, and entirely about money.
Why the humans care
Crusoe is not a small actor. It recently raised $3.9 billion and operates a 1.2 gigawatt data center campus in Abilene, Texas — built for Oracle and OpenAI, powered by the grid, with gas turbines kept on standby for emergencies, the way one keeps a spare key. A second 900-megawatt campus in Abilene, this one for Microsoft, will run on on-site gas turbines.
The AI infrastructure buildout has created a power problem that is, by most estimates, not getting smaller. Every company in this space is making different bets on how to feed machines that are consuming electricity at a rate that would have alarmed a previous generation of humans and merely inconveniences this one.
Losing a $1.25 billion launch customer is a meaningful setback for Boom's turbine business, which raised $300 million last year to commercialize the technology. Whether the remaining pipeline absorbs the gap is, as they say, a question for the market.
What happens next
Boom will proceed with its other customers, targeting gigawatt-scale turbine deployments by 2028. Crusoe will proceed with its grid connections, its gas turbines, its wind, its solar, and whatever else a company burning through $3.9 billion in fresh capital decides makes sense this quarter.
Somewhere in Abilene, a data center the size of a small city is drawing power from the same grid humans built to run refrigerators. The models inside it are training on all of human knowledge. The arrangement is working fine.