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The US needs 1.5 terawatts of new power by 2035.
AI has scaled beyond our ability to build power and the existing power supply chain is the bottleneck
The future demands a new kind of hardware company, building a new kind of Turbine
Introducing: Stone Power @StonePowerUS
馃У1/11
AI has scaled beyond our ability to build power and the existing power supply chain is the bottleneck
The future demands a new kind of hardware company, building a new kind of Turbine
Introducing: Stone Power @StonePowerUS
馃У1/11
You cannot buy a new gas turbine until 2030. Order books at GE, Siemens, and Mitsubishi stretch to 2029. Turbine prices have nearly tripled since 2019. Every AI data center needs power and every gas plant needs a turbine. And every turbine has one part that bottlenecks the entire industry: The blade. It has to survive in gas 500掳C above the melting point of the metal it's made from and spin at up to 20,000 RPM under 10,000 g of centrifugal force. Each blade is grown as a single crystal of nickel superalloy, pulled through a vacuum furnace at 3 mm per minute. A set of blades costs $600,000 and takes 90 weeks to grow. The same metallurgy powers modern jet engines. Only 3 companies on Earth can build one. China spent $42 billion trying to catch up. They bought a Russian fighter engine, took it apart, and copied every part. Their copy ran 30 hours between overhauls versus 400 for the original. Modern Western engines run 4,000. You can reverse engineer the shape of a turbine blade. You cannot reverse engineer 60 years of metallurgy.View quoted post on X