Soaring AI Demand Has Data Centers Deploying Jet Engines To Keep Up

Most of you already know that the AI boom, for better or worse, puts a heavy strain on existing power grids. As companies race to build massive data centers to train the next generation of generative AI models, they’ve discovered that the local electricity supply often can't keep pace with the insatiable demand. The solution? Repurposing retired jet engines to serve as on-site power plants.

This is the reality of the AI gold rush, where the computational power of a small city is now being delivered not by a new utility plant, but by the same gas turbines that once pushed a Boeing 747 across the Atlantic.

So the gist is that AI data centers are exponentially hungrier than their traditional counterparts. A typical facility augmented with high-performance GPUs can require more than ten times the energy of a conventional server farm. The largest complexes currently being planned ...