Bastrop Blades and Vanes Foundry

Overview

Casting the Part That Limits Gas Power

SpaceX is building a foundry at the SpaceX Bastrop Complex on FM 1209 to cast gas turbine blades and vanes in-house. Hot-section blades and vanes are the scarcest part in the gas turbine supply chain: only three or four foundries worldwide can cast them for large turbines, and their order books are reported full through 2029-2030.

Musk confirmed the project on X on August 29, 2026: "The limiting factor for nat gas turbine production is casting the blades & vanes. By doing in-house casting at SpaceX, we can accelerate nat gas turbines coming online by up to 18 months." SpaceX needs gas power for its own ground data centers, including the goal of 10 GW of AI data center power by the end of 2027 for SpaceXSI, the AI unit that now includes xAI and its Grok models.

The bottleneck

Why Blades and Vanes Are Scarce

Hot-section blades and vanes sit directly behind the combustor, in gas at 3,000-3,600°F (about 1,650-1,980°C), hundreds of degrees above the melting point of the nickel superalloy they are made from. They survive because of how they are made:

• Single-crystal structure: each blade is cast as one continuous crystal with no grain boundaries for cracks to follow at high temperature.
• Internal cooling: compressor air flows through ceramic-cored passages inside the blade and out through film-cooling holes fractions of a millimeter across.
• Investment casting with directional solidification: molten alloy is poured into a ceramic shell and cooled from one end, and a spiral crystal selector at the base lets only one grain grow into the part.

The furnaces, ceramic cores and metallurgy this takes are concentrated in a few companies: Precision Castparts (Berkshire Hathaway), Howmet Aerospace, and Consolidated Precision Products of Cleveland, which GE Aerospace agreed to buy on September 8, 2026 for $11.75B, plus a few European and Japanese specialists.

Data centers have filled that queue. A campus needs grid power, which takes years to connect in most markets, or on-site generation, which today means gas turbines, and GE Vernova is reported sold out of turbine capacity through 2030. Around Austin, Meta Temple, the US 79 corridor and the Cedar Creek cluster a few miles south compete for the same delivery slots, and the casting backlog stretches a 24-month turbine delivery to 36-42 months.

Raptor

A Second Customer: Raptor Turbopumps

The metallurgy that makes turbine blades also makes Raptor turbopump parts, which run at comparable temperatures and speeds in similar superalloys. Morgan Stanley wrote on August 16, 2026 that one foundry could spread its cost across power generation and rocket engine parts. Turbopump castings would add a Texas link to the Raptor chain:

• Design: Hawthorne, California
• Casting: Bastrop, Bastrop County
• Engine build and test: SpaceX McGregor, McLennan County
• Launch: SpaceX Starbase, Cameron County

Bring your own power

Part of a Wider Move Into Gas Power

Gas turbines deliver first, and blade casting sets how fast they ship.

Musk tied the foundry to solar in the same post: SpaceX and Tesla are each building 100 GW a year of solar capacity, "but natural gas will still be needed to supplement and bootstrap solar for several years." The foundry joins other SpaceX gas moves:

• SpaceXSI has run gas turbines at the Colossus data centers in Memphis since 2024; SpaceX says the temporary units will be replaced with a permanent 1.2 GW gas plant by July 2027.
• SpaceX is spending $2.8B on gas turbines for its AI data centers (WIRED, May 2026).
• Musk personally bought APR Energy, an operator of trailer-mounted turbines with more than 1 GW of fleet capacity, for about $1B; the deal closed in May 2026 and surfaced in a Federal Trade Commission filing in July.

Related coverage

Related Coverage

• SpaceX Bastrop Complex
• SpaceX Gigasat Factory
• SpaceX Starlink Factory Bastrop
• Behind-the-Meter Power
• Cedar Creek Data Center Cluster
• SpaceX McGregor Engine Facility