Boom Supersonic raises $300M and pivots engine technology into 42-megawatt AI data center power turbines

bring him in from the reream waiting room, let me tell you about getbzzel.com. shop over 26,000 luxury watches. Fully authenticated in-house by Bezel team of experts. We have Blake Shaw. Look at Blake Schaw. Wow. He is in a jet. [laughter] Oh yeah, he can fly. I forgot. You can fly, right?

Hang on, guys. I got to shut the engines down.

This is crazy. What is going on here? Wow. Look at this.

It's been a complete rat race to try and put on the most insane performance during a TBPN interview. I think this is going to take the cake. Blake, how are you doing? Introduce yourself. What's going on today?

Hey guys, it's good to see you. Thank you for having me. It's a big day at Boom.

This is a huge day at Boom. I'm so

This is amazing. Look at this. Okay, where are we? Take us through this. So, we are in the Boom Supersonic factory. This, of course, is the XP1 airplane. This is the airplane that broke the speed of sound in January. The airplane that resulted in supersonic flight being legal again in the US. Amazing.

So, it's blown wide open.

Uh, but you know, a year ago, a year ago, we were joking that um it would be way easier to fund this company if we were an AI company. We were laughing.

Yes. I talked about that on the show. That's right.

Yes. It It turns It turns out we are. So, uh, the engine that we're building that we've been building for almost four years now to power our overture supersonic airliner

makes the perfect ground power turbine for AI. And so that's that's today's news. We've got a product called Super Power 42 megawatts natural gas. It's going into data centers. Cruso is our launch customer. We're going to be generating tokens and uh, quiet sonic booms.

That's amazing. That's amazing.

So So you guys want to see the factory?

Absolutely.

Give us a tour. give us a tour.

So, one of the one of the things that anybody building in uh in hard tech learns quickly is that the legacy aerospace aerospace supply chain is just really screwed up.

And so, we are building this factory to go from raw materials in one side of the building and completed jet engines out the other side. So, this is uh this is some of the raw material that's just come in. This is uh 17 pH uh hardened stainless steel. It's heat treated. This is the This is what they call the hot stuff.

And uh you know, I don't I missed the gym this morning, so do a little bit here. But this is going to turn into stage five stator veins that go inside the uh the Sony uh engine and the super power gas turbine. Um so one of the most amazing surprising things is the technology that is ideal for supersonic passenger flight is actually the same thing you need to power a data center.

Yeah. So this is uh Elon pioneered this at Colossus. Uh Sam's doing the same thing at Stargate. These large arrays of what are called aerodyivative jet engines.

And uh it's like the they're like the blade servers of the energy world. I put a lot of them in array. Uh and just the same way blade servers beat mainframes, uh aerodynam uh gas turbines. So let's tell how they work. This is a one-third scale model of our engine. It works on a complicated principle. Suck, squeeze, bang, blow.

All right, so let's break that. Break that down. Air comes in this way. This thing spins super high RPM, compresses. You can see the blades get smaller as you go in getting the air down to about a 20 to1 compression ratio.

Burners in here. This can run on jet fuel. Can also run on natural gas just with a different fuel nozzle. And it goes out the back here. So the model you're looking at here is what powers the airplane.

The model that powers AI is very similar. We basically take the fan off the front, we lose these two turbine stages, and then we have what's called a free power turbine on the back. Three stages that extract energy, spin a second shift uh second shaft.

Yeah.

And uh and that powers a 42 megawatt generator.

Yeah.

So, like I said, the vision here is we're going from raw materials in one side of the building, completed engines at the other side. The facility we're standing in now is going to do the first 200 megawatts uh over the next uh about 18 months.

That's pretty. We're building a much larger factory that's able to do 2 gawatt a year and we're just going to scale from there.

Wow.

So, um let's go inside the shop.

Yeah. And this is all um on the back of you they it was it was seen as controversial that boom did not just white label another engine from another company. Correct. Uh and now it's sort of come back to benefit you. Is that is that the correct narrative?

I I think that's correct. I mean people called us crazy. Yeah.

To not outsource our engine. Frankly, I was a little bit nervous about it. How is this really going to go?

It's the best decision we ever made. We're getting a fully custom cruise. Could not do Boomless without our own engine.

Sure.

It enables a totally new passenger experience. I haven't revealed it yet. Y

and then I think the most important thing is we can now take that same engine core, put a power turbine on it and and get to profitability years faster than otherwise we could have. This this makes uh basically superpower makes not just electricity, it makes capital and it makes the capital that finances the the capital expensive uh development of the overture passenger airliner. So uh let me let me uh walk you around the shop here. So this is basically the first unit of what we will copy paste into the the facility that will do 2 gawatts per year. What are what are jeans made of? Well, you've got big round things. Um, and actually if you look inside this machine here, this is called a um a turnmill. This machine weighs 65,000 lbs. And spinning on it right now is a 4,000 lb doughut of cast incanel. And that's that's a nickel alloy. Uh, this is a relatively hard alloy. This is going to be the turbine center exhaust frame. This is the first very large part that we're machining in house. So big round things. Uh then you've also got uh discs with blades all around them. That's called blisks. Uh these are some of the hardest to make parts. And so we have started what we call the blisk cre. And uh this machine here is actually a more than five axis mill.

Uh so this will hold a disc of forged uh titanium or forged powder metal super alloy and then the disc will kind of rotate in and out like this while another cutter head comes down. and basically sculpts each individual compressor blade uh out of uh out of metal. So we uh uh ultimately we're going to have a whole bunch of these machines cranking out discs. Uh over here on the uh other side, this this is part of an automated production line or compressor blades. Uh so to give you an example of this, this is the uh what's called the stage one variable guide veins. This goes in the front part of the compressor section of the engine. Uh, these actually move as the engine changes power settings to have the optimal air flow.

And this machine here starts with that bar stock, those those kind of heavy beams I was showing you outside in the in the hanger floor.

Uh, comes in on this feeder in one side, gets held in the machine. The cutter head comes over, cuts it away. Uh, another um gripper comes over, grabs it, machines the back side. A robotic arm comes in, grabs it, puts it on the table. We start the next door. So, this thing is ultimately going to be able to run 247 building engine parts.

Quick questions about the factory. Uh, where are we? What where is this factory and how big is it overall square footage roughly?

Yeah. So, this this building is about 70,000 square feet. It is uh 5 minutes from our engineering HQ in South Denver.

And uh we are uh we're about to open uh early next year another factory that is three times the size of this one. That's what's going to be able to do uh two gigawatts a year.

Yeah.

So, what are the what are the key what are the key challenges now? Uh this feels uh hard but maybe more straightforward than uh supersonic commercial flight like what what what are you guys doing approvals?

Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. But and and have like massive uh massive demand. Uh yeah. What are kind of like the key challenges that you and the team are looking out for to to be able to deliver on on the timeline that you were talking about?

Yeah. So, after having done a boomless supersonic jet that was safety critical with a pilot on board, this feels like doing it on easy mode. Literally XB1 had 68,000 parts.

68,000 parts and they're all safety critical.

Uh the turbine has less than 2,000

and uh so the there's going to be a lot of challenge in in getting that to work, getting it to work reliably, getting manufacturing up to scale. But after having done XB1, it feels like easy mode. Uh we've got customers that are going to take as much as we can possibly make as fast as we can make it. Uh we've got today we've got the capital uh to go do that.

How much capital?

Um 300 million. And

congratulations.

Thank you. Thank you. after um after basically continuously fundraising for about a decade,

I can't tell you how good it feels to have raised the round that lets us ship the revenue product that then produces the cash to fund the rest of the stuff. So, we're done fundraising. This is the last equity round we ever have to do.

Let's go.

That's incredible. How was the first night's sleep after you close the round? Did you [laughter] Did you I imagine I imagine that was a pretty uh pretty surreal moment even though the you know, you're still uh just getting started. Uh I would say uh I uh people are going to be cons like the natural concern is like does this mean we're not getting uh we're not going to get uh the supersonic commercial aircraft? You obviously I I don't I don't I haven't lost any faith.

Uh this feels like an intelligent uh move in order to enable that future basically by buy the company time to get us to that point. But uh what do you what do you have to say to uh anybody that might be wavering?

Yeah. No, this if you want super passenger flight to exist, you should be very very excited about this is that the single biggest challenges we had were how do we prove that we have a reliable engine and where do we get all the money to do it and running this thing on the ground proves the engine is reliable and it literally prints the cash that we need to go develop the airplanes. So I think this takes us from, you know, less than 50% chance of success to a far greater chance of success. Like I think overture supersonic flight is is basically inevitable at this point. And you know, some people are saying like, "Oh, I'm, you know, Blake got lost. I'm going to be, you know, I'm just going to become an energy guy." And it's like, guys, I didn't bust my ass for 10 years in order to like only make power turbines. I'm very excited about the power turbine business. America needs it. Like we're losing to China. We really need this. Uh but uh this is absolutely our bridge to the the even bigger opportunity to just reinvent all of commercial aviation.

It's awesome.

Makes uh makes a lot of sense from a from a like looking at the existing sort of like turbine uh landscape. A lot of them have supply chain challenges. is part of Boom's Edge that you guys are so used to making all of your own componentry and parts that you basically effectively just need the raw materials and you can make stuff happen. Uh how are you kind of avoiding uh maybe some of the other delays that you know uh legacy manufacturers are experiencing.

Yeah. Well, I I think you named it. Being able to build our own parts is huge. And uh the you know the room I'm standing in here uh does not exist at GE does not exist at Rolls-Royce.

Uh you know the the in the sort of Jack Welch era of everyone getting focused on return on net assets like by what a random metric. They all sold off their supply chains. Yeah.

And they can't make anything anymore. And now we we hire like disaffected engineers out of Pratt, out of GE, and they were like, "Holy Toledo, we can resolve in an hour what used to take us three weeks or three months to do at our last companies because they didn't have access to hardware." And if they ever wanted to change anything, it's really hard to change. That's actually one of the biggest um biggest innovations here is what we're doing is we're trying to make the world of uh atoms more like the world of bits. And you can iterate, you can evolve, you can change. And part of that is about taking software engineers, putting them on a hardware engineering teams and automating uh design workflows. So that means we can like change digital designs really quickly when we learn. The other piece is how quickly can we turn a part? Like if we take a turbine blade and we send it to a traditional supplier to be made, it's going to take six maybe nine months for us to get that part back. Going from digital design to hardware. What that means is if you're the engineer designing it and you get it wrong, like it's really bad. you've set the whole company back six, nine months. So now now, now there's a lot of hand ringing. Now there's analysis paralysis. Now you got to have layers of managers double-checking everything. Now you're really slow. But if you build that part in house, you can actually turn a turbine blade in 24 hours with a 3D print process, heat treat, brace, get it out into the engine. So what we can do is iterate really quickly. So, we're liberating engineers to move really fast because if they make a mistake, if they want to do an iteration, we can turn it in days or hours in the same building that they work in.

That's super powerful because

I see what you did there.

Was that accidental? [laughter] I don't know. I love it. I love it. Um, is there is there anything um that you've been tracking on the on the regulation side that you think needs to change? We were talking about making uh making uh boomless cruise legal, removing speed limits for high-speed travel. Uh if you were to wave a magic wand, is there anything that you'd change around energy production in America today to accelerate reindustrialization and everything?

It's much bigger than energy production. We have we have a huge problem that I think not enough people are talking about, which was we we have a permissionbased approach to building. Sure.

Not a freedom to innovate approach to building. So like if we drove to work the way we build buildings or uh permit energy plants, uh you'd have to go file a plan. You have to list out exactly what turns you're going to take. You're going to promise that you're going to stop at every stop sign, not run through any red lights, always drive the speed limit, and then and then some bureaucrat's going to sign off on that, and then finally you can drive to work. It's insane. That's the way we build a building. That's the way we build a power plant. I think we need to go from um permissionbased which is a such huge delays I mean huge costs to hey we're going to have a rule book we're going to have commonplace rules um and then you can you can pledge to follow them and if you break them then um you know then you get fined or you get in trouble or you get your permits taken away but I I think we have to really get rid of the entire concept of market preapprovals if we want to move fast. It's really holding America up right now. It's the biggest problem with building anything physical.

Yeah. Yeah. Uh, are you guys hiring at all right now?

Uh, we're hiring as fast as we can find great people. Uh, so in fact,

I figured,

in fact, if I I'll plug this if you'll let me. If if you go to boomchupersonic.comreferral

and you send us somebody great, we're looking for great engineers, hardware, software, mechanical, propulsion, everything. Technicians, um, CNC and machinists. It's hard to find enough great CNC and machinists. Send us somebody. We will send you a free overture desktop model if we end up hiring that person.

I love it.

That's very cool.

That's very cool.

Uh well, this has been the best uh hard tech tour we've ever gotten. We've had a number of people attempt what you just did. It always it always goes poorly.

Yeah, there was no high stakes. It's very high stakes cuz like anything can go wrong with like your Wi-Fi or anything. I'm very impressed. Uh this was amazing and uh and honestly it was just like chilling, watching, learning. This was really awesome. normally have to ask way more questions to get information, but this was really informative.

I'm so excited for you and the team put together.

What a crazy story. I mean, I'm sure like, you know, the the job's not finished. The book has not been written, but uh I you know, you know, I've followed your career for a long time and uh it's uh it's you're on an amazing run doing amazing things. So, we appreciate you taking the time to come talk to us.

Appreciate you having me and making this so much fun. Thank you guys. Have a great rest of your day and merry Christmas to the whole team. Talk to you soon.

Merry Christmas. Over and out.

Goodbye.

8.com. Exceptional sleep without exception. You close the $300 million round. You need to sleep on an eight sleep. Fall asleep faster. Sleep deeper. Wake up energized. If you're trying to build a 42 megawatt natural gas turbine while working on a supersonic jet, you definitely need a good night's sleep. my eight sleep to be powered by a natural gas turbine. I want to

just give me a mini boom

turbine for my bedroom. Yes,

please. [laughter]

Just a small one.

It doesn't have to be full scale.

Yeah.

But just something small that I can really rely on.

Yeah.

Uh because

Yeah, it is weird. The the eight sleeps, you plug it into the wall, it's electric. You could get a diesel

a diesel version. You just fill it up with a little bit of diesel and then and then you and then you you pull start it like a lawn mower

and just leave the window open.

Yeah.

So there's some air blows out. Yeah. I mean the exhaust needs to like kind of flow out of the out of the house. But

or you could wear a mask and just run a like a

Well, that could be diesel powered too.

You have a diesel [laughter] powered sleep pulling air out that's fresh.

Exactly. Exactly.

But then you have a diesel motor running in. You put your whole house on your face. Your face is potentially

kind of vibrating, but

it' be good.

Can see it.

Uh, well, people are starting to talk some trash about the old Meta Super Intelligence Lab.

Who? 0.005 seconds says it's now painfully obvious that Meta Super Intelligence Lab went on a massive hiring spree, promised the world, and delivered absolutely nothing. There has been a mass exodus. I feel like W Alex Wang was a colossal mishhire. When is Zuck going to clean house and admit his mistake?

Let him cook.

Let him cook.

Let him cook. I was the first one I was the first one to say that Meta Vibes like should never have been uh released or uh at least advertised

publicly. I think it was uh definitively

uh just not a good product. Y

uh and uh but let them cook. Let him cook. Uh I Yeah. Again, the mistake is like people are going to judge the first thing that your new organization releases. It felt rushed. It looked bad in comparison to Sora. Uh but we need to see the next version of Llama. I'm sure they'll call it something else. Uh but uh give them give them more than

what should they actually

like Google has been able Gemini I feel like has been able to carve out a really unique position with Nano Banana and and like it went viral and this was an at uh and at the time's like take about like the empire strikes back and I have found that like you know having the best having the best video model is a reason for people to go to your app having the best uh you know audio model the best photo model. The best deep research product is what what the rotisserie chicken is to Costco. Nano Banana [laughter] analogy. Great analogy,

right? It's a loss leader. It's like come in, make a bunch of images. We're going to lose a lot of money, but we're going to get you hooked on our bread and butter,

our our language model.

And so, yeah, I mean, OpenAI has obviously developed just a great like back and forth chat experience. The the the voice mode is really dominant there. The deep research product. possible that Zuck wanted his true believers to be able to accumulate Meta shares at around the $1 and a half trillion dollar mark

because he wants to reward his most loyal

potentially

soldiers

potentially. Uh Stammy here says Limitless is acquired by Meta today. End to a lovely journey with Rewind and Limitless. And Ryan Jones says Zuck is going on a generational run of Max Paranoid missing mobile. Really, really, really scared him because he just bought an AI wearable startup. still spend it on the metaverse. Um,

I think it's obvious that Meta is just going to keep shipping hardware. I think that uh this the Limitless acquisition looked like, you know, a soft landing for a team that had proven that they can ship products. Again, they did that. I know they had customers because some of the customers were mad that Meta acquired them and they were talking about it.

Uh, so yeah, I shouldn't be a surprise. I don't think you can I I think it's hard to hard to argue that

Meta should just ignore any forwardinking product lines and just just do

Yeah. Well, speaking of the metaverse, we should watch this video of a robot that was clearly being teleoperated

absolutely destroying a water bottle. It's one of the craziest videos I' ever seen. Uh this is like so insane. So it the operator clearly takes off. It feels like it should be AI or something. So the

Daniel says the hand coming down with enough the water bottle which is not easy to do if you just have a water bottle and you're you can't just rip that thing open. But the the the the robot op the robot teleoperator takes the VR glasses off and then the robot just falls backwards.

Is this real?

Imagine having one of these hanging out.

It's comedic genius. Imagine having one of these hang out in your office and it's just running bits all the time. Like it's whole goal. I I have kind of class clown energy in the office, but if I could outsource that to Optimus and just be able to focus more on my work and he's Optimus is just going around running bits. I mean that

you know what we have to do? We have to get one of these robots that you know how they're how so many of the robots are are claiming like we're going to do your dishes. We're going to do your dishes. I just I want to just have Okay, we're gonna all have a nice glass of wine. We're gonna put 50 different glasses, wine glasses of all slightly different shapes on the table and just tell the robot, "Hey, clean up the clean up the wine glasses. Just load them all in the dishwasher." Nothing's I can barely do that. I can barely do that without breaking.

Oh, yeah. All the time I'm smashing these things. Um, and you imagine one of these robots just completely decimating the the the

Sure. I'll I'll unload the dishwasher just in there just

Oh, no. No, no. Please allow me allow me to unload the your your your finest crystal stemware.

This would be allow me to unload your stemware.

You discover an edge case where the robot thinks, well, to unload the dishwasher, I should break every glass and use a vacuum and just vacuum it out. Way easier than just taking them all out at once.

Oh. Oh. Oh, sorry, sir. Would you like me to polish your your your fine stemware? [laughter]

I'll polish it into dust.

Polishes it into dust. Anyway, uh our next guest is in the reream waiting