Stuck in years-long queues for grid connections and new turbines, some AI data centers are making their own electricity with converted jet engines, the New York Times reported on Tuesday. The engines are pulled from retired aircraft, stripped of their flight fans and rebuilt to burn natural gas. Nobody treats them as a permanent power plant; their appeal is speed.
Elon Musk’s xAI has installed eight converted jet-engine turbines in Mississippi to help power its Colossus 2 data center in Memphis, according to state permits and satellite imagery reviewed by the Times. The units come from ProEnergy, a Missouri company that rebuilds a General Electric engine commonly found on Boeing jets, and each unit can generate up to about 50 megawatts. Rystad Energy analyst Audun Martinsen told the Times that with jet-powered units an operator can have a data center running in 24 months, against about seven years to connect 100 megawatts to the grid in Northern Virginia, according to the International Energy Agency.
OpenAI’s first Stargate site in Abilene, Texas followed the same route in 2025 with gas turbines. Crusoe, the Denver-based builder of the Abilene campus, ordered 13 of ProEnergy’s converted units in April 2026, and in September walked away from a $1.25 billion deal to buy 29 natural gas turbines from Boom Supersonic while confirming it still plans to use turbines. FTAI Aviation has launched a competing conversion business using retired Boeing 737 and Airbus A320 engines, and in July 2026 it secured a $1.5 billion contract to supply retrofitted generators to a major cloud provider.
The trade-offs are arriving with the permits. Converted engines are less fuel-efficient and pollute more than purpose-built gas turbines, and more units are needed for the same output. Mississippi’s permits for the xAI turbines allow carbon monoxide emissions at twice the rate of other on-site turbines and volatile organic compounds about 25 percent higher, and the Southern Environmental Law Center has challenged the approvals, arguing xAI has not shown the units meet standards for pollutants including formaldehyde.
The demand signal underneath is unforgiving. Last month Microsoft pulled out as 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. Most new conventional power capacity is not expected until 2031, a Mitsubishi Power executive told Bloomberg last week. Against those timelines, a dirtier megawatt in 24 months is beating a clean one in seven years.