xAI installs eight converted jet engines to power Mississippi data center

ChrisArchitect

Related NYT piece: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/11/03/climate/jet-engines-ai-da... ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50352584 )

tencentshill

Makes it pretty clear generation capacity was never a real argument against EV adoption. We'll recycle rusty jet engines to get it done when there's real money on the line.

joshstrange

This is off-topic and I'm no fan of xAI or any company circumventing rules to allow them to use dirty energy sources. That said. > Normally, that would be enough to keep around 15,000 homes up and running. Am I the only one who finds this kind of comparison meaningless? Like it's supposed invoke a feeling of "15K homes worth of power! How absurd that a data center use that much!" but that kind of how all centralized things work. That datacenter does work for, one would assume, way more than just 15K homes and if those homes wanted the same "work" output they'd use the same, or most likely, more energy to accomplish the same thing. In many/most cases they aren't using electricity just to use it, they are using it because people are paying them for the output. With economies of scale I would guess a datacenter is many times more efficient than if we were all running local models at home. Again, not an argument for data centers as much as I find this comparison always pointless.

bob1029

I know this is not a great application, but the Brayton cycle really is quite amazing from an engineering perspective. The amount of power we can generate per unit of volume or mass is incredible. That's why they keep using these damn things. To get a sense of scale, the new GE helicopter engine can produce 3000 shaft horsepower (~2.2 MW) and it only weighs around 200kg. A commercial truck in the US can haul 20,000kg worth of mass before requiring a babysitter.

buildsjets

These seem like soft targets for an adversary, whether that be a competitor, a goverment, or non-goverment organization. I wonder how well a LM6000 would handle multiple drone ingestions.

avazhi

Pretty clever to use the engines to generate power at scale - as a plus, if there are any efficiency gains (whether in power production or pollution terms) they may make their way back to the aerospace industry eventually. Complaining about carbon monoxide production and formaldehyde in these things suggests to me that the cons aren’t as serious as the article suggests, as carbon monoxide is produced by every combustion engine on the planet and formaldehyde remains used in a great number of things. If that’s the worst outputs from these engines then I’m sure there are many far more harmful methods of generating power.

bashtoni

Good thing jet engines are famously quiet. I'm sure that will get all the people protesting against data centers on side.

rayiner

Do you think the author realizes that gas turbine makers already sell aeroderivative turbines because the core power plant of a gas turbine generator and a jet engine are very similar?