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hubie [soylentnews.org] writes:

Cast-off turbines generate up to 48 MW of electricity apiece [tomshardware.com]:

Faced with multi-year delays to secure grid power, US data center operators are deploying aeroderivative gas turbines — effectively retired commercial aircraft engines bolted into trailers — to keep AI infrastructure online.

According to IEEE Spectrum [ieee.org], facilities in Texas are already spinning up units based on General Electric's CF6-80C2 and LM6000, the same turbine cores once found on 767s and Airbus A310s. Vendors like ProEnergy and Mitsubishi Power have turned these into modular, fast-start generators capable of delivering 48 megawatts apiece, enough to support a large AI cluster while utility-scale infrastructure lags.

Fast, loud, and anything but elegant, these "bridging power" units come from vendors like ProEnergy, which offers trailerized turbines built around ex-aviation cores that can spin up in minutes to meet energy demand. Meanwhile, Mitsubishi Power's FT8 MOBILEPAC, which derives from Pratt & Whitney jet engines, delivers a similar output in a self-contained footprint designed for fast deployment.

While this might not be the cheapest, and certainly not the cleanest, way to power racks, it's a viable stopgap for companies racing to hit AI milestones while local substations and modular nuclear power deployments remain years away.

[...] In one of the more visible examples, OpenAI's parent group is deploying nearly 30 LM2500XPRESS units [tomshardware.com] at a facility near Abilene, Texas, as part of its multi-billion-dollar Stargate project. Each unit spins up to 34 megawatts, fast enough to cold-start servers in under ten minutes.

Also see: Data Centers Look to Old Airplane Engines for Power [ieee.org]

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