SpaceX Turbine-Blade Foundry Meets xAI's Memphis Pollution Fight

Elon Musk says SpaceX's new foundry in Bastrop, Texas can shave a year and a half off the wait for new natural-gas turbines, according to TechCrunch.

"By doing in-house casting at SpaceX, we can accelerate nat gas turbines coming online by up to 18 months, which is a profound game-changer," Musk wrote on X. He added that SpaceX and Tesla are each building 100 GW per year of solar production capacity, "but natural gas will still be needed to supplement and bootstrap solar for several years."

SpaceX bought roughly 830 acres near its existing Starlink factory in Bastrop between March and June, with job listings pointing to a "blades and vanes foundry." The single-crystal turbine blades SpaceX wants to cast are made at industrial scale by only a handful of companies worldwide, and their order books run out for years: GE Vernova, TechCrunch notes, is "essentially sold out of production capacity through 2030."

The other half of the piece is uglier. In Memphis, where xAI has run gas turbines to power its Colossus data centers since 2024, the NAACP has accused the company of "operating turbines without the permits or pollution controls required by federal law." The group flags emissions of "smog-forming compounds and hazardous chemicals like formaldehyde, pollutants linked to asthma, respiratory disease, and certain cancers." University of Memphis researchers found air pollution grew "slightly worse" because of the data center. SpaceX has said the unpermitted Memphis turbines will not be fully removed until July 2027, as it transitions to a permanent 1.2-gigawatt natural gas plant.

For a sense of scale, TechCrunch cites a Piedmont Environmental Council study of a Virginia site: eight full-time gas turbines could reach "more than 2.5 million people across multiple counties" with an estimated "3.4 to 6.5 additional premature deaths a year, translating to $53 million to $99 million in annual health-related damages."

This is our second Bastrop alert since Saturday's confirmation of the foundry buildout, and it lands in a week we also covered the EPA moving to end federal notice on data-center air permits.