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Aircraft startup Boom Supersonic said Tuesday it will start selling a version of its turbine engine as a stationary power plant, and that its first customer will be data center startup Crusoe.

Crusoe will buy 29 of Boom’s 42-megawatt turbines for $1.25 billion to generate 1.21 gigawatts for its data centers. Boom said it will announce more details about a turbine factory next year, with first deliveries occurring in 2027.

To commercialize its Superpower stationary turbine, Boom raised $300 million in a round led by Darsana Capital Partners with participation from Altimeter Capital, Ark Invest, Bessemer Venture Partners, Robinhood Ventures, and Y Combinator.

Profits from the sale of Superpower units will go toward funding continued development of the company’s Overture supersonic aircraft, Boom founder and CEO Blake Scholl told TechCrunch.

It’s an arrangement that Scholl likens to SpaceX’s Starlink satellite constellation. The satellite internet service is reportedly profitable, helping the company to bankroll the development of its rockets.

“I’ve been kind of keeping my eyes open for 10 years for what could be our Starlink,” he said. “I said no to a thousand things because I concluded they were distractions. This one we’re saying yes to because it’s so clearly on path.”

Boom said Superpower and its airborne engine called Symphony share 80% of their parts. Earlier this year, Boom’s XB-1 demonstrator was the first civil aircraft developed by a private company to break the sound barrier.

Crusoe is paying $1,033 per kilowatt of generating capacity. For that, Boom will deliver the turbines, generators, control systems, and preventative maintenance. Crusoe will have to provide everything else, including pollution controls, electrical connections, and so on.

That’s on the higher side for that type of power plant. A typical airplane-derived — or aeroderivative — turbine costs around $1,600 per kilowatt, a price that also includes pollution controls, engineering, construction, land acquisition, permitting, pipelines, and more.

In a typical project, the turbine and pollution controls contribute about 46% of a project’s total cost. Applying that percentage to Boom’s figures would likely push the total cost to over $2,000 per kilowatt. That’s pricey for a simple-cycle gas turbine and more in line with costs for combined-cycle gas turbines slated to come online in the early 2030s.

Boom’s Superpower is targeting 39% efficiency, similar to competitors. Combined cycle turbines can recover heat from the exhaust to boost efficiency above 60%.

Boom is also developing a “field upgrade” to convert its turbines from simple cycle to combined cycle, Scholl said. Operators could do so today using existing combined-cycle kits, though adding them would require longer installation times. “Those combined-cycle plants tend to be construction projects,” he said.

Like other aeroderivative turbine generators, Superpower will be delivered in a shipping container, and developers like Crusoe will be responsible for electrical and gas hookups in addition to pollution controls.

Scholl said the power plants should be “no louder” than existing aeroderivative turbines, though that’s not exactly quiet: Residents near xAI’s Colossus data center report hearing similarly sized turbines from at least half a mile away.

The first few stationary turbines will be made at Boom’s existing facilities while the company builds a larger factory. The goal is to produce 1 gigawatts’ worth in 2028, 2 gigawatts’ worth in 2029, and 4 gigawatts’ worth in 2030. If Boom can hit those numbers, it would represent a significant expansion in the turbines available to be deployed.

Boom still has a challenging few years ahead of it. If the company can pull it off, supersonic commercial flights could happen sooner than even Boom expected. But scaling production is never easy, and many startups have struggled to cross the valley of death that separates early-stage hardware companies from their commercial peers.

The competition between AI chatbots has been heating up, with Google’s Gemini nipping at OpenAI’s heels. On Monday, I wrote about how Gemini’s share of weekly mobile app downloads increased in late November following the release of Gemini 3, according to data from research firm Sensor Tower, which says it tracks 5 million consumers globally.

Gemini’s growth is also evident on the web. Between August and November, Gemini’s global website visits doubled while ChatGPT’s rose about 1% over the same period, according to the Sensor Tower data. Monthly active users tell a similar story during the period: Gemini’s increased roughly 30% to 346 million while ChatGPT’s rose about 5% to 810 million.

These figures explain why OpenAI CEO Sam Altman called an internal “code red” to focus on ChatGPT and delay other initiatives.

While OpenAI remains dominant, Google’s AI reach is greater than the numbers suggest. Google CEO Sundar Pichai, for instance, said in July that more than 2 billion people see Google’s AI-generated search answers, AI Overviews, every month, and in November said that the Gemini app has more than 650 million users per month. That’s not including Google Search’s chatbot-like AI Mode, which the company says has more than 75 million daily active users globally.

Still, ChatGPT has nearly 900 million weekly active users, according to a person with knowledge of its growth. Its monthly active user figure is probably substantially higher.

Aside from Google’s momentum, one factor that could be slowing ChatGPT growth is that it already captured the easiest and most accessible users, which means the next stage of growth will be harder. Facebook, for example, reached 500 million users in 2010 and doubled that number in just two years to 1 billion. But it took another five years for the company to double that figure to 2 billion users.

OpenAI likely will face a similar growth trajectory to Facebook as it expands beyond the U.S.

ChatGPT’s top five markets by weekly active users are U.S., India, Brazil, Japan and France, according to the person with knowledge of its growth.

ChatGPT also has a decent edge over Google Gemini in terms of raw usage, though Gemini is gaining on it.