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Twenty-nine jet engines sit in a West Texas field. Crusoe, an infrastructure partner to OpenAI, ordered them in two batches from late 2024 through mid-2025. Each unit produces about 35 megawatts of electricity; together they produce a gigawatt, about the same output as a nuclear reactor.
Such investments reflect a fashionable worry that AI’s appetite for electricity will choke the current AI boom—that the United States will run out of power before it runs out of demand for AI computation.
Michael Hochberg is a visiting scholar at the Centre for Geopolitics at Cambridge University, a California Institute of Technology-trained physicist, and a serial semiconductor entrepreneur.
