Boom Plans to Finance Supersonic Flight With Data Center Power

Blake Scholl says Boom Supersonic is attempting to make its supersonic-aircraft program financially viable by selling stationary power to AI data centers before its passenger aircraft enters service. The company’s first application for its engine, he says, “isn’t in the sky. It’s actually on the ground for data centers.”

The shift grew out of a setback. Boom had tried to outsource engine development to Rolls-Royce, an approach Scholl calls “one of the dumbest things” he did. When that relationship ended publicly, he says, observers concluded that Boom was doomed: major engine manufacturers had declined to provide the propulsion system the company needed.

Boom’s answer was to develop its own engine, called Symphony, to pair with its Overture passenger aircraft. Scholl argues that this was not simply a forced substitution for an absent supplier. It created an opportunity to redesign both the engine-development process and the production system around digital design and digital manufacturing. Boom is making its own parts, including turbine blades and vanes, then assembling and testing the engine itself.

The resulting core can also be used without an airplane. Remove the fan from the front of the supersonic engine and place a generator behind it, Scholl says, and it becomes a source of power for data centers. Boom calls that product Superpower.

Scholl says the system can be packaged in a few trailers and deploy 42 megawatts of behind-the-meter power. The engine core was designed to run continuously at high power in the hot environment associated with Mach 1.7 flight, he says, and the stationary configuration does not need water. Scholl dismisses water use as a weak objection to data-center expansion, while arguing that a system that avoids the issue has an easier commercial path.

The commercial logic is timing as much as technical reuse. A trailerized generating system can be delivered to a site that needs power without waiting for an aircraft to enter airline service. Scholl says there are “tens of gigawatts of demand” in his inbox, an extraordinary level of demand by his account, and that Boom plans to run its first engine and auction its output.

When Jason Calacanis asks whether the project is already making money, Scholl calls it an “incredible money printing business” and says he has never seen comparable demand. Calacanis frames the opportunity as a way to finance an otherwise capital-intensive effort to build a successor to Concorde. Scholl’s account is that the former liability of having no large engine supplier has become a route to an earlier market.

Boom’s first vertically integrated engine core was being assembled and, Scholl said, was scheduled for a test stand the following month. Ground deployment would put the core through sustained use before it is installed on a passenger aircraft. Scholl expects that sequence to make the eventual aviation engine the most tested new jet engine ever made.

The company is also trying to own the production system rather than merely the engine design. Scholl says a factory at an undisclosed location had made its first parts the prior week and is intended to scale to multiple gigawatts of annual output. Over five years, Boom aims to add more than 10 gigawatts to the grid. Its model starts with raw materials, makes difficult components such as blades and vanes, assembles engines, and tests them on its own stands.

That vertical integration reflects Scholl’s broader industrial argument. Engineering and manufacturing have to work together, he says. He rejects the legacy-company model of extensive outsourcing and a “return on net assets” approach that, in his view, leads companies to spin out their crown jewels. Reindustrialization, as he describes it, means inventing the next generation of manufacturing technology in the United States and using it to build new products, rather than simply restoring production that moved to China.

Blake Scholl frames the aircraft program as a response to what he sees as a long stall in commercial aviation. In 1969, he notes, the world both landed on the moon and flew an airliner through the sound barrier. More than half a century later, commercial passengers still cannot fly faster than sound, and the United States has not returned people to the moon. “Houston, we have a problem,” he says.

His narrower indictment is aimed at the commercial-aircraft industry. Boeing, he says, brought the jet age with the 707 in 1957 but has not launched a new airliner since 2004. Its current aircraft, in his formulation, are “a literal carbon fiber copy” of the first jetliner. Boom has interns who were born after Boeing’s last new-airplane launch, he says. The incumbent is formidable, but in his view not especially awake: “It’s David and Goliath, but Goliath is like… asleep.”

The lost capability is not merely symbolic. At Mach 1.7, Scholl says, a New York–London journey could take three and a half hours rather than six and a half. Los Angeles to Sydney could take eight and a half hours rather than 14 and a half. Faster flight, he argues, would change the practical reach of business, culture, and personal relationships. His broader ambition is to make the planet “dramatically more accessible.”

Boom’s test aircraft, XB-1, is central to Scholl’s argument that a small new entrant can still advance aviation. He describes XB-1 as the first privately developed jet to break the sound barrier. A flight panel shown during the presentation identifies a January 28, 2025, supersonic flight at Mach 1.04 and 612 knots; another shows the aircraft at Mach 1.18, 671 knots, and 36,514 feet.

Scholl says the aircraft was built by roughly 50 people, rather than the thousands he believes a large aerospace company would have assigned to such a project. The company streamed one supersonic flight through what he calls the first supersonic installation of Starlink, using video filmed on an iPhone. For Scholl, the public demonstration mattered partly because students watched it in classrooms: children who might have tuned out of aviation, he says, tuned in.

XB-1 supplies the development model Scholl wants to defend. A small team, starting with a cardboard-and-plywood cabin mock-up in a garage, can take on a category that established aerospace companies have left largely dormant. The next task is turning that demonstration into an airliner, an engine program, and an operating business.

Blake Scholl says Concorde’s political legacy was a U.S. ban on civil supersonic flight over land, introduced in 1973. A newspaper headline shown in the presentation described supersonic civilian flights over the United States as outlawed.

Boom’s answer is “boomless cruise,” a technique aerospace specialists call Mach cut-off. Scholl says the technique does not eliminate the boom at the aircraft. Instead, it uses the atmosphere’s natural refractive properties to redirect the boom upward, so that it makes “a big U-turn in the sky and never touches the ground.”

That phrase describes the experience on the ground, not the full Mach 1.7 operating profile. Scholl says boomless cruise works up to roughly Mach 1.3, about 50% faster than current commercial flight. At that speed, he says, a passenger could leave New York at 9 a.m. and arrive in San Francisco at around 9:30 a.m. local time. Over water, where people on the ground are not exposed to the boom, Overture could operate at its intended Mach 1.7 speed.

Scholl says Boom demonstrated the principle with XB-1 and then pursued a legal change. After the sound-barrier flight, he says, he spoke with the president, who agreed that a ban should not apply if there is no sonic boom on the ground. According to Scholl, the ban ended through an executive order on June 6 of the prior year.

He does not regard an executive order as a permanent solution. “Theoretically some idiot could reverse it,” Scholl says. Boom therefore went to Congress seeking statutory change. He says the Supersonic Legalization Act passed the House unanimously and later cleared the Senate Commerce Committee unanimously; it still needs to pass through the rest of the Senate.

The unanimity matters to Scholl because he sees supersonic flight as a nonpartisan industrial and transportation issue. He also contrasts the speed of the current administration with what he expects would have been a slower process elsewhere. Scholl says he broke the sound barrier on a Monday, flew to Washington that night after beginning the legalization campaign, had a West Wing invitation by the time he landed, and saw a model of the aircraft reach the Oval Office by Thursday. The executive order followed 115 days later.

Jason Calacanis presses Scholl for the two numbers prospective passengers will care about: when they can fly and what they will pay. Scholl begins with a constraint: faster travel succeeds only if it is safe, comfortable, and affordable. He characterizes Concorde as “zero out of three” on those measures. Boom, he says, should deliver all three.

For a transatlantic journey at Mach 1.7, Scholl puts the break-even fare at roughly $3,500 round trip. He says the eventual selling price would likely be higher, leaving room for airline profit.

On timing, Scholl gives a goal of four years. “It’s more important to be fast than to be predictable,” he says, declining to specify exactly how long the work will take. Calacanis translates the target into a potential 2030 arrival. Scholl’s answer is that Boom will make the service available at the earliest date physically possible.

Scholl does not treat the first commercial aircraft as the end state. Asked about private aviation, he says private-jet manufacturers should build a supersonic aircraft and that Boom may do so if they do not. His measure of success is broader: supersonic travel across categories, from a supersonic Air Force One to business aircraft and commercial service available to passengers across fare classes.

He illustrates that ambition through his young daughter’s expectation that rockets return to their launch pads, shaped by watching videos of rocket landings. Supersonic travel will have won, Scholl says, when a later generation finds six hours to cross the country implausibly slow. Reaching that point will require many generations of airplanes.