Boom Builds $150 Million Power-Turbine Factory to Help Fund Supersonic Airliner

Boom Supersonic wants to build a successor to Concorde, but its next factory will produce electricity-generating turbines rather than passenger jets. The company is investing $150 million in a nearly 200,000-square-foot operation in Centennial, Colorado, where engine-related technology developed for its proposed Overture airliner will be commercialized first as ground-based power equipment.

The strategy reverses the sequence expected from an aircraft startup: earn revenue and operating experience on the ground before the airliner carries passengers. Boom intends to sell its 42-megawatt Superpower natural gas turbines to AI data centers and other large electricity users, using the resulting revenue to help finance Overture development and certification. According to Boom’s October 22 factory announcement, components are already being manufactured as construction continues.

For readers rooting for an aerospace challenger, the appeal is straightforward. Instead of relying solely on future aircraft sales, Boom has found another potential market for closely related turbine technology. The same core machinery intended to support faster passenger flight could begin earning money while stationary, serving facilities that need substantial on-site electricity.

That does not make Superpower a substitute for the Overture program. Ground operation can generate extensive durability, maintenance and reliability data, but an aviation engine still must undergo its required flight testing and regulatory approval. Boom has not announced that the power-turbine business will shorten Overture’s development schedule, and turbine revenue does not guarantee that the airliner will reach production.

A physical factory behind the strategy

The Colorado investment gives the plan more substance than a broad pitch tied to artificial intelligence. Boom says the two-building factory could create up to 500 jobs and will be fully operational in early 2027, with initial customer deliveries targeted for mid-2027. Production targets call for 25 turbines in 2028 and 50 in 2029.

Each Superpower unit is designed to generate 42 megawatts. Approximately 24 would provide around one gigawatt of capacity, while annual output of 50 units would amount to roughly two gigawatts. The system is designed to arrive in four road-transportable modules containing the intake, turbine, generator and exhaust, a configuration intended to make deployment more manageable than shipping one fully assembled plant.

Boom also says the turbine can maintain full output in temperatures above 110 degrees Fahrenheit without consuming cooling water for the power-generation process. Those remain company performance claims until supported by operating results, but they identify the practical market Boom is pursuing: large power users looking for modular generation that can be installed at their sites.

The manufacturing approach is unusually vertical for a young aircraft company. Boom plans to produce components representing about 85% of each turbine by weight at the Centennial campus, including blades, vanes, shafts and cases. A planned digital foundry would cast single-crystal turbine blades and vanes, parts designed to tolerate sustained high temperatures. Keeping design, manufacturing and testing close together could allow engineers to move revised components into hardware faster than a process dependent on outside supplier schedules.

This facility is dedicated to power turbines. It is separate from Boom’s planned Overture aircraft-production campus in Greensboro, North Carolina, preserving a clear boundary between the near-term industrial product and the much larger task of building a certified supersonic passenger aircraft.

The first core moves toward firing

Boom has now assembled Sprint Core, a 12-foot-long prototype weighing approximately 14,000 pounds. It combines the compressor, combustor and high-pressure turbine the central hot-section machinery shared by the Superpower concept and the Symphony engine planned for Overture.

The core is headed to the company’s test facility at Colorado Air and Space Port. More than 1,000 sensors are incorporated into the core itself, with approximately 2,000 planned across the complete test setup, including support equipment. Those instruments will measure conditions such as temperature, pressure, strain and vibration, providing data to calibrate engineering tools and refine the production turbine.

Boom expects the first firing before Thanksgiving. That test will not put Overture closer to certification by itself, but it will determine whether the company’s ground-first strategy has produced a working turbine core the first concrete technical test of a business plan linking data-center power to the return of supersonic passenger flight.

By David Whitaker — Associate editor for AMI’s aerospace and drone systems desk, translating flight systems, aircraft programs, spaceflight, and UAV developments into accessible technical stories.