The deal that is off
Crusoe has walked away from an agreement to buy 29 of Boom Supersonic’s 42-megawatt Superpower turbines, a $1.25 billion order whose first deliveries were due in 2027, TechCrunch reported on Friday.
Boom’s chief executive, Blake Scholl, put it plainly: “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.”
Crusoe’s own framing is that the partnership was not the right fit, and that it prioritises flexible energy — turbines, wind, solar, batteries and grid power — chosen per site rather than committed to in advance.
Why a jet-engine company was selling turbines
Boom is building the Overture supersonic airliner. The Superpower line is a stationary power plant derived from its Symphony jet engine, and the company raised $300 million last December largely to commercialise it, positioning the power business as a way to fund the aircraft.
Crusoe was the launch customer. The original order, reported at the time as 1.21 gigawatts, was the anchor that turned a derivative product into a business line.
What Abilene actually runs on
The cancellation is less surprising read against Crusoe’s sites. Its first 1.2-gigawatt campus at Abilene, built for Oracle and OpenAI, runs on grid power with gas turbines held for backup. The 900-megawatt Microsoft campus it is building in the same place is designed around on-site gas.
That is the distinction that killed the order. Backup generation and prime power are different purchases, and a turbine bought as a hedge against a grid connection is not a turbine bought to run continuously. Where the grid arrives on time, the case for buying 29 of them in advance weakens.
Boom’s position without its anchor
Scholl said other customers are in the pipeline, that Boom will deliver about 250 megawatts of Superpower turbines to other sites next year, and that the company is targeting a gigawatt in 2028.
Those are smaller numbers than the Crusoe order alone, and they are now spread across buyers rather than concentrated in one. For a product whose commercial case was built on a single launch partner, the next contract announcement matters more than the one that was just cancelled.
What it says about the build-out
The story running underneath this is the power question that every data centre schedule now turns on. Operators bought generation because grid connections were the binding constraint; where that constraint eases, the equipment orders placed against it come up for review.
Crusoe has not said it is buying less power. It has said it wants to decide per site. That is a colder market for anyone selling a fleet of turbines two years ahead of delivery.
