Crusoe drops Boom’s turbine launch deal after the $1.25 billion plan unraveled

Crusoe has ended its planned partnership with Boom Supersonic’s Superpower turbine business, according to TechCrunch. That closes the loop on a deal Boom had used to introduce Superpower to the market and to frame the business as a commercial bridge between aerospace engineering and AI infrastructure.

The change matters because the original agreement was not just another supplier contract. Boom’s own December 2025 press release said Crusoe was the launch customer for Superpower and described the order as 29 turbines worth 1.21 gigawatts, with backlog above $1.25 billion. Those figures are Boom’s statements, not independently audited numbers in the retrieved material, but they show how central Crusoe was to the turbine program’s early commercial case.

Crusoe confirmed to TechCrunch that it is no longer doing business with Boom. Boom CEO Blake Scholl later said on X, as reported by TechCrunch, that turbines were no longer part of Crusoe’s near-term primary power mix. Crusoe’s spokesperson, Andrew Schmitt, said the company stays flexible and chooses energy sources that fit each site, including turbines, wind, solar, batteries and the grid. Neither company cited a product failure in those statements. Their stated reason is that the launch arrangement no longer matched Crusoe’s near-term power plans; the record does not establish any deeper commercial or technical cause.

What the deal was supposed to do

Boom’s strategy depended on reuse. The company said Superpower shares much of its engine architecture with Symphony, the engine program supporting its Overture supersonic airliner. In Boom’s telling, that common core would let one engineering effort support two markets: aviation and stationary power. Boom presented Superpower as a 42-megawatt natural-gas turbine that could deliver full output in hot conditions and run without water. Those performance claims have not been independently tested in the retrieved sources.

For an AI infrastructure buyer, the proposed value was site-level power capacity. An order of 29 units would have tied a specific generation product to Crusoe’s construction plans; it was more concrete than a pilot or an expression of interest. That made Crusoe a particularly important early reference customer for Boom.

That is why the breakup is meaningful even though Crusoe is not abandoning power-intensive infrastructure. The company recently said it raised $3.9 billion in Series F financing and described a vertically integrated buildout across data centers, cloud and power. The financing announcement does not explain the turbine cancellation. Crusoe is also not turning away from gas entirely: TechCrunch reported, citing Crusoe, that its initial 1.2-gigawatt Abilene campus for Oracle and OpenAI is grid-powered with gas turbines used for backup, while a separate 900-megawatt Abilene site for Microsoft is planned with on-site gas turbines.

Why this is a practical signal for AI buyers

The practical consequence is that AI data center power procurement remains highly site-specific. A turbine can be the right answer for one campus and the wrong answer for another, depending on whether the asset is intended for base load, backup, or temporary bridge power. Crusoe’s wording suggests it wants latitude to mix grid interconnects, turbines, batteries and renewables rather than locking a new campus into a single vendor story.

For Boom, losing the launch customer removes the cleanest public proof point for Superpower just as the company is trying to commercialize the product. TechCrunch reported that Scholl said other customers are still in the pipeline, and Boom’s release had already tied turbine sales to funding for Overture’s development. The business can still move forward, but without Crusoe it has to prove demand without the partner that was meant to anchor the launch.

The uncertainty that remains is narrow but important. The retrieved material shows that the partnership ended and gives both companies’ explanations, but it does not independently verify any deeper negotiation history or technical fault. The available evidence supports the narrower conclusion that the launch partnership no longer fit Crusoe’s stated near-term power mix.

Watch Boom’s next Superpower customer announcements and Crusoe’s next Abilene power choices; together they will show whether this was a site-specific mismatch or a broader reset in AI data-center power buying.