I know this is not a great application, but the Brayton cycle really is quite amazing from an engineering perspective. The amount of power we can generate per unit of volume or mass is incredible. That's why they keep using these damn things. To get a sense of scale, the new GE helicopter engine can produce 3000 shaft horsepower (~2.2 MW) and it only weighs around 200kg. A commercial truck in the US can haul 20,000kg worth of mass before requiring a babysitter.
Makes it pretty clear generation capacity was never a real argument against EV adoption. We'll recycle rusty jet engines to get it done when there's real money on the line.
Utility monopolies have been raising rates, and profits, for a long while now, to the point where making you own power is cheaper. On average, 15 cents per dollar directly into profit [1].
Pretty clever to use the engines to generate power at scale - as a plus, if there are any efficiency gains (whether in power production or pollution terms) they may make their way back to the aerospace industry eventually. Complaining about carbon monoxide production and formaldehyde in these things suggests to me that the cons aren’t as serious as the article suggests, as carbon monoxide is produced by every combustion engine on the planet and formaldehyde remains used in a great number of things. If that’s the worst outputs from these engines then I’m sure there are many far more harmful methods of generating power.
This is off-topic and I'm no fan of xAI or any company circumventing rules to allow them to use dirty energy sources.
That said.
> Normally, that would be enough to keep around 15,000 homes up and running.
Am I the only one who finds this kind of comparison meaningless? Like it's supposed invoke a feeling of "15K homes worth of power! How absurd that a data center use that much!" but that kind of how all centralized things work. That datacenter does work for, one would assume, way more than just 15K homes and if those homes wanted the same "work" output they'd use the same, or most likely, more energy to accomplish the same thing.
In many/most cases they aren't using electricity just to use it, they are using it because people are paying them for the output. With economies of scale I would guess a datacenter is many times more efficient than if we were all running local models at home.
Again, not an argument for data centers as much as I find this comparison always pointless.
It's like using bathtubs as a unit of measure for large volumes of water. Yes it communicates the scale, but abjectly fails to communicate the relative in-cohort comparison i.e. is this a lot of power for an industrial user? Is it wasting power /generating more emissions relative to other similar applications or not?
Mainstream news is pitched at an audience that hasn't got a clue what is a joule or a kilogram. You must've seen Sam Altman make the efficiency argument for data centers. But it deliberately bypasses the point, which is that data centers and frontier AI companies are systemically important and must be supported for the good of the nation.
I mean, they need to give an intuition of the magnitude. Tell me, what do you think when I say “a GPU consumes 1 kW of power”? What does that even mean to the regular Joe?
It is pretty easy to compare against homes because they consume on average 1 kWh of electricity (in the U.S.). It could be something else, but 99% of people have homes they live in, so this is something directly linked to their experiences. So it is not meaningless at all.
As always, remind yourself: "the outrage is the product". The entire point of slotting something like that in is to get eyeballs and produce outrage on tap. It's the new dopamine. Justified or not is irrelevant, what matters is to have a talking point you can use to rile things up, no matter how pointless it is.
I know this is not a great application, but the Brayton cycle really is quite amazing from an engineering perspective. The amount of power we can generate per unit of volume or mass is incredible. That's why they keep using these damn things. To get a sense of scale, the new GE helicopter engine can produce 3000 shaft horsepower (~2.2 MW) and it only weighs around 200kg. A commercial truck in the US can haul 20,000kg worth of mass before requiring a babysitter.
Makes it pretty clear generation capacity was never a real argument against EV adoption. We'll recycle rusty jet engines to get it done when there's real money on the line.
Utility monopolies have been raising rates, and profits, for a long while now, to the point where making you own power is cheaper. On average, 15 cents per dollar directly into profit [1].
[1] https://energyandpolicy.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/Payin...
These seem like soft targets for an adversary, whether that be a competitor, a goverment, or non-goverment organization.
I wonder how well a LM6000 would handle multiple drone ingestions.
Likely the PE6000 in this case...
They need to get through a lot of filtration and potentially evap coolers, or that stuff could just become FOD.
Pretty clever to use the engines to generate power at scale - as a plus, if there are any efficiency gains (whether in power production or pollution terms) they may make their way back to the aerospace industry eventually. Complaining about carbon monoxide production and formaldehyde in these things suggests to me that the cons aren’t as serious as the article suggests, as carbon monoxide is produced by every combustion engine on the planet and formaldehyde remains used in a great number of things. If that’s the worst outputs from these engines then I’m sure there are many far more harmful methods of generating power.
This is off-topic and I'm no fan of xAI or any company circumventing rules to allow them to use dirty energy sources.
That said.
> Normally, that would be enough to keep around 15,000 homes up and running.
Am I the only one who finds this kind of comparison meaningless? Like it's supposed invoke a feeling of "15K homes worth of power! How absurd that a data center use that much!" but that kind of how all centralized things work. That datacenter does work for, one would assume, way more than just 15K homes and if those homes wanted the same "work" output they'd use the same, or most likely, more energy to accomplish the same thing.
In many/most cases they aren't using electricity just to use it, they are using it because people are paying them for the output. With economies of scale I would guess a datacenter is many times more efficient than if we were all running local models at home.
Again, not an argument for data centers as much as I find this comparison always pointless.
It's like using bathtubs as a unit of measure for large volumes of water. Yes it communicates the scale, but abjectly fails to communicate the relative in-cohort comparison i.e. is this a lot of power for an industrial user? Is it wasting power /generating more emissions relative to other similar applications or not?
Agree. Comparing it to other industrial users (X car factories) might be more useful.
Mainstream news is pitched at an audience that hasn't got a clue what is a joule or a kilogram. You must've seen Sam Altman make the efficiency argument for data centers. But it deliberately bypasses the point, which is that data centers and frontier AI companies are systemically important and must be supported for the good of the nation.
I mean, they need to give an intuition of the magnitude. Tell me, what do you think when I say “a GPU consumes 1 kW of power”? What does that even mean to the regular Joe?
It is pretty easy to compare against homes because they consume on average 1 kWh of electricity (in the U.S.). It could be something else, but 99% of people have homes they live in, so this is something directly linked to their experiences. So it is not meaningless at all.
As always, remind yourself: "the outrage is the product". The entire point of slotting something like that in is to get eyeballs and produce outrage on tap. It's the new dopamine. Justified or not is irrelevant, what matters is to have a talking point you can use to rile things up, no matter how pointless it is.
Related NYT piece: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/11/03/climate/jet-engines-ai-da... (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50352584)