Key points
- Elon Musk said Saturday that SpaceX will cast gas turbine blades and vanes in-house, claiming it can pull new turbines forward by up to 18 months.
- Howmet (HWM) says it holds more than 50% of the global market for those blades, and its gas turbine revenue rose 38% last quarter.
- GE Vernova (GEV) signed 20 GW of gas-equipment contracts in Q2 while shipping 3 GW, an imbalance Musk says casting capacity can help address.
Elon Musk said Saturday that SpaceX will cast gas turbine blades and vanes at its own foundry, and that doing so can bring new natural gas turbines online up to 18 months sooner. "The limiting factor for nat gas turbine production is casting the blades & vanes," he wrote on X. "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."
The post came in a reply about powering AI data centers, and it repeats a point Musk made in February on the Dwarkesh Podcast, where he said of turbine blades and vanes that "there are only three casting companies in the world that make these, and they're massively backlogged." He didn't name the three.
The Information has reported that SpaceX is laying groundwork for a turbine blade factory aimed at the data center power crunch, and SpaceX's careers page currently lists a Sr. Tooling Design Engineer, Investment Casting role in Bastrop, Texas. The listing covers the "design and development of wax injection molds and ceramic core injection molds used to produce turbine blades and vanes." Investment casting builds a metal part from a wax pattern inside a ceramic mold, and for turbine blades it has to hold tolerances on parts that run in gas hotter than the melting point of the alloy they are made from.
Blade casting appears to be one of the key choke points in a turbine market already booked years ahead. GE Vernova (GEV) signed 20 GW of gas-equipment contracts in the second quarter while shipping 3 GW, a widening demand-and-delivery imbalance that Musk says casting capacity can help address. We covered that gap in our piece on the turbine shortage. How fast that power arrives is one of the inputs behind our AI bubble index, which tracks how much of the announced data center pipeline becomes real capacity. GE Vernova closed Friday at $911.53, down 4.4%.
Who casts turbine blades today
Howmet Aerospace (HWM) is the one publicly traded pure play. Its second quarter revenue was $2.55 billion, up 24%, and its gas turbine revenue grew 38% from a year earlier, according to the company's results release. On the August 6 earnings call, the company said it has "a market share in excess of 50% globally for turbine blades in the IGT market." IGT stands for industrial gas turbine, the land-based machines that power plants run.
In the release, CEO John Plant said, "Demand in the gas turbines market is extraordinary with customers already revisiting and adding to their demand outlooks." On the call, the company said capital spending will likely top $500 million this year, with a further step up planned for 2027. The stock closed Friday at $264.83, down 1.1%, before Musk's post.
Precision Castparts, which Berkshire Hathaway (BRK.B) bought for $37.2 billion in 2016, also casts turbine airfoils. Privately held Chromalloy is the third name most often cited in the industry. The specialty alloys those foundries pour come from a short supplier list of their own, led by Carpenter Technology (CRS), which closed Friday at $476.33, down 2.9%, and ATI Inc (ATI), at $210.76, down 1.8%.
Musk's post also carried a solar claim: that SpaceX and Tesla (TSLA) are each building 100 GW per year of solar production capacity. Neither company has published plans supporting a figure that size, and Musk gave no timeline for it. Tesla closed Friday at $348.76, down 1.7%, and SpaceX, which would do the casting, isn't publicly traded.
The market gets its first chance to react Monday. For now the gas keeps its place in Musk's plan: "natural gas will still be needed to supplement and bootstrap solar for several years."
Market data via Robinhood, August 28, 2026 close. This article is for information only and is not investment advice.
