Crusoe scraps $1.25 billion deal for Boom's turbines

Crusoe, the Denver-based AI data center builder that recently raised $3.9 billion, has ended its plan to buy stationary power plants from fellow Denver company Boom Supersonic. Founded in 2018 as a bitcoin miner running on excess natural gas from oil fields, Crusoe has since become one of the largest builders of AI data centers, including a massive campus in Abilene, Texas, that supplies computing power to OpenAI.

Boom Supersonic, which is developing the supersonic passenger jet Overture, launched a business last year to sell a version of that jet’s engine as natural gas-fired stationary power plants, called Superpower. Crusoe had signed on as the launch customer, agreeing to spend $1.25 billion on 29 of Boom’s 42-megawatt Superpower turbines, with first deliveries supposed to begin in 2027. That deal has since fallen apart, Boom CEO Blake Scholl said Friday in a post on X. “The TL/DR is that turbines are no longer part of Crusoe’s near-term primary power mix at Abilene/etc., so a launch partnership just didn’t make sense,” he wrote, adding that Boom will still deliver about 250 megawatts of Superpower turbines to other sites next year and is targeting 1 gigawatt by 2028.

Crusoe confirmed to TechCrunch that it is no longer doing business with Boom. A company spokesperson said Crusoe stays flexible on energy sources as its data-center portfolio grows, choosing what fits each site — including turbines, wind, solar, batteries, and the grid — and that the Boom partnership wasn’t the right fit today, while wishing the company well.

Crusoe’s original 1.2-gigawatt Abilene campus, built for Oracle and OpenAI, runs on grid power, with a gas-turbine plant kept only for backup. The company is also building a second, 900-megawatt Abilene data center for Microsoft that will run on on-site gas turbines. Losing its launch customer is a setback for Boom, which raised $300 million last year largely to commercialize the stationary-turbine business, with the plan to funnel its profits into developing the Overture jet.

Why it matters

The reversal shows how fluid the power strategy behind AI data centers still is — large-scale campuses are mixing grid power, backup turbines, and renewables site by site — and that even a well-funded launch partner like Boom can lose a deal when a builder’s near-term power mix shifts.