It’s going to be so fun when Boom reveals our high pressure turbine blades. But I think we are going to keep them under wraps for awhile.
Gaurab Chakrabarti (@Gaurab)
Four foundries on Earth cast the single-crystal blades and vanes that let a gas turbine convert 1,500-degree gas into electricity. PCC and Howmet hold about 80% of the single-crystal market. Doncasters and CPP take most of the rest. Every heavy-frame gas turbine ordered in the past 18 months is sold out through 2030. Elon Musk on @dwarkesh_sp traced his own xAI Colossus power problem one layer down past the turbines and landed on the blades. He said SpaceX and Tesla will likely have to cast their own. We manufacture chemicals. Casting a single-crystal blade is not a metallurgy problem. It is a chemistry problem. The four foundries that cast them spent thirty years driving sulfur down to parts per billion and oxygen down to parts per million. Vacuum, gradient solidification, and mold chemistry are why nobody else can cast them. The bottleneck is chemistry.
— https://nitter.net/Gaurab/status/2053610508830576900#m