Jet Engines Pulled From Retired Airliners Now Power AI Data Centers

AI data centers stuck in years-long grid queues are generating their own electricity with converted jet engines pulled from retired aircraft, the New York Times reported Tuesday. The engines are rebuilt to burn natural gas. They are not a permanent power plant — but they expose how far electricity supply has lagged the AI buildout.

The appeal 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.

The comparison explains the desperation. Hooking up 100 megawatts to the grid in Northern Virginia takes about seven years, according to the International Energy Agency. Most new power capacity is expected to come online only by 2031, an executive at Mitsubishi Power, one of the world's top makers of power generation equipment, told Bloomberg last week.

Two years versus seven is the entire business case. The takeaway: operators are paying a premium in efficiency to buy time.

Who is already burning jet fuel derivatives?

Elon Musk's xAI has installed eight converted jet-engine turbines in Mississippi to help power its Colossus 2 data center in Memphis, the Times reported, citing state permits and satellite imagery. The units come from ProEnergy, which rebuilds a GE engine commonly found on Boeing jets.

OpenAI followed in 2025 with gas turbines at its first Stargate site in Abilene, Texas. Crusoe, a Denver-based startup that builds AI data centers, is constructing that Abilene campus and ordered 13 of ProEnergy's converted units in April.

Not every deal holds. 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 jet's engine as a power plant for data centers. A Crusoe spokesperson told TechCrunch at the time that the company still plans to use turbines.

What do the delays cost operators?

The queues are already costing business. Last month, Microsoft pulled out as the anchor customer for Nscale's data center in Loughton, England, after the local utility said it could not deliver enough power until the early-to-mid 2030s.

Policy is adding pressure in the same direction. The Trump administration is currently encouraging data centers to generate their own electricity.

In plain terms: the grid cannot keep up, and Washington is telling the industry to stop waiting for it.

Are converted jet engines a dead end?

The trade-offs are real. The engines are less efficient and pollute more than turbines designed for conventional gas plants, and it takes more of them to produce the same amount of power, according to the Times.

That may make converted jet engines a short-term play. Some experts say efficiency and environmental concerns may grow in importance within a year or two — a warning that the fastest fix on the market today could age badly once grid connections and purpose-built turbines finally arrive.

The bet, then, is that two years of early AI compute revenue outweighs the cost of running dirtier, thirstier machines. Whether that math survives tightening emissions scrutiny is the question operators have not yet answered.