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xAI installs eight converted jet engines to power Mississippi data center

15 points rbanffy 1 hour ago 12 comments

tencentshill 1 hour ago | parent

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.

nomel 1 hour ago | parent

Utility monopolies have been raising rates, and profits, for a long while now, to the point where making you own power is cheaper. On average, 15 cents per dollar directly into profit [1].

[1] https://energyandpolicy.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/Payin...

joshstrange 1 hour ago | parent

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.

FLeXMurphy 1 hour ago | parent

As always, remind yourself: "the outrage is the product". The entire point of slotting something like that in is to get eyeballs and produce outrage on tap. It's the new dopamine. Justified or not is irrelevant, what matters is to have a talking about you can use to rile things up, no matter how pointless it is.

kristjansson 55 minutes ago | parent

It's like using bathtubs as a unit of measure for large volumes of water. Yes it communicates the scale, but abjectly fails to communicate the relative in-cohort comparison i.e. is this a lot of power for an industrial user? Is it wasting power /generating more emissions relative to other similar applications or not?

triceratops 40 minutes ago | parent

Agree. Comparing it to other industrial users (X car factories) might be more useful.

zekrioca 52 minutes ago | parent

I mean, they need to give an intuition of the magnitude. Tell me, what do you think when I say “a GPU consumes 1 kW of power”? What does that even mean to the regular Joe?

It is pretty easy to compare against homes because they consume on average 1 kWh of electricity (in the U.S.). It could be something else, but 99% of people have homes they live in, so this is something directly linked to their experiences. So it is not meaningless at all.

bob1029 26 minutes ago | parent

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 21 minutes ago | parent

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.

skewbone 11 minutes ago | parent

Likely the PE6000 in this case...

They need to get through a lot of filtration and potentially evap coolers, or that stuff could just become FOD.

avazhi 4 minutes ago | parent

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 much worse ways of generating power.