Faced with years-long waits for grid connections and new turbines, some artificial intelligence data centers are generating their own electricity using converted jet engines pulled from retired aircraft, the New York Times reported Tuesday. The engines, rebuilt to burn natural gas, aren't meant to serve as permanent power plants. But they're becoming another indicator of how severely power supply has lagged behind the AI construction boom.
For operators stuck in grid connection queues, the primary appeal of converted jet engines is speed. "It's all about getting power as fast as possible," Rystad Energy analyst Audun Martinsen told the Times. With jet-powered units, "they can have a data center running in 24 months," he said. By contrast, connecting 100 megawatts to the grid in Northern Virginia takes roughly seven years, according to the International Energy Agency. Most power capacity won't come online until 2031, an executive at Mitsubishi Power, one of the world's largest makers of power generation equipment, told Bloomberg last week. In some instances, these delays are already costing data center operators customers. Last month, Microsoft withdrew as the anchor tenant for Nscale's data center in Loughton, England, after the local utility said it couldn't supply adequate power until the early to mid-2030s.
Elon Musk's xAI is among the companies already deploying the engines, having installed eight converted jet-engine turbines in Mississippi to help run its Colossus 2 data center in Memphis, the Times reported, citing state permits and satellite imagery. The units are supplied by ProEnergy, which rebuilds a GE engine commonly found on Boeing jets. In 2025, OpenAI followed Musk's approach with gas turbines at its first Stargate site in Abilene, Texas. Crusoe, a Denver-based startup that constructs AI data centers, is building that Abilene campus and ordered 13 of ProEnergy's converted units in April. In September, Crusoe abandoned a $1.25 billion deal to purchase 29 natural gas turbines from Boom Supersonic, a startup developing a supersonic passenger jet that has also started selling a version of that jet's engine as a power plant for data centers. A Crusoe spokesperson told TechCrunch at the time that the company still intends to use turbines. The Trump administration is currently adding to the pressure by encouraging data centers to produce their own electricity.
Converted jet engines come with downsides, though: They're less efficient and generate more pollution than turbines designed for conventional gas plants, and it requires more of them to produce the same amount of power, according to the Times. The mismatch between AI's breakneck expansion and the power industry's slower timelines is driving companies toward these interim solutions. Grid infrastructure upgrades and new turbine manufacturing simply can't keep pace with the surge in data center construction, leaving operators to choose between waiting nearly a decade for grid access or adopting less-efficient temporary power sources. That calculus may shift as efficiency and environmental concerns grow more pressing in a year or two, some experts say, potentially making converted jet engines a short-term workaround rather than a lasting answer. The power crunch reflects a fundamental infrastructure challenge: AI deployment is outrunning the capacity of traditional energy systems to support it, forcing operators to weigh speed against sustainability. For now, the race to secure computing capacity is trumping concerns about emissions and efficiency, though that balance may not hold indefinitely as regulatory and investor scrutiny intensifies.