AI Firms Turn Old Jet Engines into Data-Center Power

Power shortages and long grid lead times are pushing artificial intelligence companies to repurpose retired jet engines as temporary generators for data centers. The engines, removed from aircraft and rebuilt, can be deployed to burn natural gas and feed on-site generators, allowing firms to produce at least part of their own electricity without waiting for a grid connection.

Rystad Energy analyst Audun Martinsen says the rapid start-up is the method's chief advantage. According to Martinsen, refurbished jet engines can bring a data center online in about 24 months. By contrast, connecting a 100 megawatt data center to the grid in northern Virginia can take roughly seven years. Mitsubishi Power has also forecast that most new generation capacity will come online by 2031.

How the conversions work and who is using them

In practice, retired jet engines are stripped from airframes, overhauled and adapted to run on natural gas. Once tied to electrical generators, they provide on-site energy capacity that bypasses waits for regional transmission upgrades. ProEnergy is one company rebuilding engines for these installations.

Several large tech players have turned to the approach. SpaceXAI, a company associated with Elon Musk, has installed eight refurbished General Electric engines in Mississippi; ProEnergy rebuilt those units and they are intended to help power the Colossus 2 data center in Memphis. OpenAI used gas turbines in 2025 to supply power to the first Stargate project center in Texas; the builder named Krosu had ordered 13 refurbished engines from ProEnergy. Krosu also in September this year walked away from a 1.25 billion dollar deal to buy 29 gas turbines from Boom Supersonic, but said it still plans to use turbines to generate power.

Grid constraints have even stopped some projects. Microsoft recently withdrew from a collaboration with Nscale to build a data center in Laf-ton, England after the local utility said it could not supply the site until the early or mid-2030s. At the same time, the Donald Trump administration has been encouraging data center operators to produce their own power.

There are trade-offs. Refurbished jet engines are generally less efficient and more polluting than purpose-built power-plant turbines, and more units are required to produce the same output. For those reasons some experts view the conversions as a temporary workaround to get capacity online while longer-term, more efficient and lower-emission solutions are developed.

Refurbished jet engines can shorten deployment to about 24 months, but their lower efficiency and higher emissions make them likely a stopgap rather than a permanent replacement for grid or purpose-built generation.