Sam Altman called Blake Scholl because OpenAI needed turbines and couldn’t find them anywhere else. The call was about power equipment, not funding or board seats.
This is a Joel Litman dark energy story — the kind of company that sits at the intersection of aerospace engineering and the AI power crunch. Scholl is the CEO of Boom Supersonic, a private aviation company building the first supersonic passenger jet since Concorde. Altman is an early Boom investor. He knew what the company was working on — a brand-new jet engine called Symphony, designed to push a plane at Mach 1.7 at 60,000 feet. He also knew something the public didn’t: jet engines are gas turbines. And gas turbines are exactly what AI data centers cannot get enough of.
So Altman called. And asked if Boom would turn its supersonic engines into power plants.
Understanding who Boom is, what they built, and why the call happened tells you everything about how desperate the energy market has become.
What Is Joel Litman Dark Energy?
Dark energy SpaceX $10T boom is the umbrella thesis; Joel Litman dark energy specifically is the thesis that behind-the-meter natural gas turbine generation is becoming the power foundation of the AI buildout. Litman’s argument is that AI data centers cannot wait for grid interconnection queues that run five to ten years, and that hyperscalers are deploying aeroderivative gas turbines on flatbed trailers to bypass the grid entirely. The dark energy thesis identifies the companies supplying turbines, gas, and infrastructure as the toll roads of the AI economy.
The Company That Broke the Sound Barrier Alone
Boom Supersonic was founded in Denver in 2014. It went through Y Combinator in 2016, where Sam Altman was president. The mission: build a supersonic airliner that airlines could actually afford to operate.
That sounds like a moonshot. But Boom did something unprecedented. On January 28, 2025, its XB-1 demonstrator became the first independently developed, privately funded aircraft to break the sound barrier. Chief Test Pilot Bill “Doc” Shoemaker hit Mach 1.122 over the Mojave Air & Space Port — the same airspace where Chuck Yeager first broke Mach 1 in 1947.
The company didn’t just prove supersonic flight was possible. It built a new engine from scratch. Symphony is a 40,000-pound thrust turbofan designed for continuous high-temperature operation — not the brief burst of power a subsonic engine produces at takeoff, but sustained output at extreme thermal loads. That design philosophy matters, because it’s the exact same property that makes a great stationary power turbine.
Boom has raised over $700 million total. Investors include Breakthrough Energy Ventures, Emerson Collective, American Express Ventures, Bessemer Venture Partners, Prime Movers Lab, Y Combinator, and the NEOM Investment Fund. It has 130 aircraft on pre-order from American Airlines, United Airlines, and Japan Airlines. It built a Superfactory in Greensboro, North Carolina designed to produce 66 Overture airliners per year.
The institutional backers, airline commitments, and factory construction are all verifiable.
The Call That Changed the Product Line
Here’s what happened next, in Scholl’s own words published on Boom’s blog in December 2025:
“I was reading post after post about the power crisis hitting AI data centers — GPU racks sitting idle, waiting not on chips, but on electricity. I texted with Sam Altman — who confirmed power was indeed a major constraint. I pinged our engineering team — and found that they already had the outline of a plan to build a power turbine based on our Symphony supersonic engine.”
Altman wasn’t alone. Crusoe co-founder Cully Cavness called Scholl around the same time with the same message: “America’s got an electricity crisis. The grid isn’t scaling. China’s kicking our ass. We are building our own power plants, and we can’t get enough turbines.”
Three months later, Boom had a signed deal for 1.21 gigawatts.
The product is called Superpower. It’s a 42-megawatt natural gas turbine built from the same core as the Symphony engine. Crusoe — an AI infrastructure company powering OpenAI’s Stargate I site in Abilene, Texas — is the launch customer, ordering 29 units for $1.25 billion. Boom raised another $300 million from Darsana Capital Partners, Altimeter Capital, Ark Invest, and others to manufacture them.
Why This Makes Technical Sense
Jet engines and gas turbines are the same technology, so the pivot follows from the engineering. A turbofan’s high-pressure core spins a fan that generates thrust. Remove the fan, attach a generator, pipe in natural gas instead of Jet A — you have a power plant. Rolls-Royce and GE have been doing this for decades. The GE LM6000, widely deployed at AI data centers today, is literally a CF6-80C2 engine that once flew on Boeing 767s.
What makes Boom’s version different is the supersonic design history. Symphony was built to run at Mach 1.7 at 60,000 feet, where effective engine temperatures reach 160 degrees Fahrenheit. Legacy aeroderivative turbines based on subsonic engines start losing power at around 50 degrees and can lose 30% of capacity by 110 degrees. Superpower maintains full 42-megawatt output at high ambient temperatures without water cooling — a significant advantage in Texas and Arizona, where most data centers are being built.
This is exactly the kind of engineering detail Joel Litman emphasizes in his Altimetry hidden alpha Dark Energy research. The turbine shortage is a specific technology bottleneck. The most popular aeroderivative turbines are based on 1970s subsonic engine designs, their manufacturers are sold out through the end of this decade, and nobody is building a next-generation replacement — except a supersonic jet company in Denver.
The Numbers Worth Watching
The Crusoe deal is $1.25 billion for 29 turbines. That’s about $43 million per unit, or $1,033 per kilowatt of generating capacity. For comparison, a new combined-cycle natural gas plant costs roughly $800-$1,200 per kilowatt to build, but takes five to seven years to permit and construct. Boom is promising first deliveries in 2027.
The company’s production targets are aggressive: 1 gigawatt in 2028, 2 gigawatts in 2029, 4 gigawatts in 2030. If Boom hits even the first milestone, it will be a meaningful fraction of the aeroderivative turbine market. If it hits all three, it becomes a major industrial supplier almost by accident.
Scholl has said Superpower profitability will fund the remainder of the Overture aircraft program. Every hour a Superpower turbine spins is an hour of reliability data for the Symphony engine core. The economics create a feedback loop: the more turbines Boom sells for AI power, the more certified hours its engine accumulates, the faster it can get the Overture airliner through certification.
What This Really Tells Us
A supersonic jet company is now a power company because the CEO of OpenAI called and asked. That is not normal.
It tells you the turbine crunch is real. When Altman has to call an aviation startup for power equipment, the traditional supply chain has failed. It tells you the Dark Energy thesis Litman describes — behind-the-meter natural gas turbines, deployed at data center campuses, bypassing the grid — is happening at billion-dollar scale with OpenAI as the end customer.
And it tells you there is a technological edge in building engines for supersonic flight that translates directly into building better power turbines. Boom discovered that the hardest engineering challenge in aviation — continuous operation at extreme temperatures — is exactly the hardest engineering challenge in stationary power generation.
That is the kind of convergence that creates outlier outcomes. Not every Dark Energy supplier will be a winner. The ones solving real engineering bottlenecks are the ones to watch.