Boom Supersonic's Engine Now Powers Data Centers

Boeing has not launched a new commercial airplane design since 2004. The company that opened the jet age in 1957 with the 707 now flies a carbon-fiber airliner that Blake Scholl, founder and CEO of Boom Supersonic, calls a copy of its own first plane. Scholl, a former software engineer who left jobs at Amazon and Groupon, opens his talk with a blunter image than that: half a century after Apollo astronauts walked on the Moon and an airliner first broke the sound barrier, commercial aviation has not gotten faster. It has, in his telling, gone quiet (00:57).

The story of how a 12-year-old startup with no aerospace pedigree ended up building the first privately developed jet to fly faster than sound is, on its face, a story about audacity. In 2015 Scholl pitched Jeff Bezos, his old boss, on Boom's seed round. Bezos passed, and then wrote in Amazon's 2015 shareholder letter that no entrepreneur, however good, was going to build an all-composite airliner in a garage startup (02:15). Boom's actual garage, Scholl says, held a supersonic mockup built from cardboard, plywood, and seats from Office Depot (02:29). Ten years later, in 2025, a 50-person team flew XB-1, a demonstrator jet, past Mach 1.1, making Boom the first private company to break the sound barrier (04:37). The flight streamed live over Starlink, the satellite internet service, in what Boom says was the first supersonic in-flight internet installation (03:13).

"Boeing hasn't built a new airplane in 20 years. I mean, it's David and Goliath, but Goliath is, like, asleep." — Blake Scholl [00:10]

The more interesting story, though, is about what nearly killed the company along the way, and what that failure accidentally solved. For years Boom outsourced its jet engine to Rolls-Royce, the British manufacturer that builds engines for most of the world's airliners. Scholl now describes that decision without much diplomacy.

"One of the dumbest things I ever did was try to outsource our engine development to a big old company." — Blake Scholl [06:27]

When the Rolls-Royce partnership collapsed publicly, people declared Boom finished. Instead the company built its own engine from scratch, and then kept going: it now makes its own engine parts, including turbine blades, the curved metal components that spin inside a jet engine to convert hot gas into thrust. Scholl's argument is a manufacturing philosophy as much as an engineering one. Legacy aerospace companies, he says, outsource everything and chase return-on-assets targets that push their most valuable engineering out the door. Boom is doing the opposite: designing engines with modern digital tools, then building the factory that makes them, starting from raw material (07:48, 09:11).

That vertical integration produced a business Boom did not originally plan to be in. Boom's supersonic engine core is designed to run at full power in a hot environment at Mach 1.7. Pull the fan off the front, attach a generator to the back, and the same core becomes a power plant. Packed into a couple of trailers, it generates 42 megawatts of what Scholl calls behind-the-meter power, electricity produced on-site rather than drawn from the public grid, for uses like AI data centers (08:39). Because the engine is built to run hot, it needs no water for cooling, which sidesteps a common objection to data-center construction in water-stressed regions. Boom says its first vertically integrated engine core is being assembled now, with testing to begin next month, and the company aims to add more than 10 gigawatts of power to the grid over the next five years (09:36). Scholl calls the demand for this product the strongest he has seen for anything in his career, describing tens of gigawatts of interest already in his inbox (13:22).

The Physics of a Quieter Boom

None of this solves the problem that killed supersonic passenger flight the first time: the sonic boom, the shockwave produced when an aircraft outruns the speed of sound, which rattled windows and drew complaints wherever Concorde flew overland. The United States banned supersonic flight over its own territory in 1973, a rule that outlived Concorde itself, which was retired in 2003. Boom's fix, which it calls boomless cruise, relies on a property of the atmosphere rather than the airframe. Warmer, denser air near the ground bends sound waves, and Boom's engineers found that below roughly Mach 1.3, about 50 percent faster than today's subsonic jets, that natural refraction curves the boom's path back upward before it reaches the ground (05:16, 12:26). Above that speed, over land, the boom still lands. Over open ocean, where no one is underneath to hear it, an Overture jet can run at its full design speed of Mach 1.7, cutting an Atlantic crossing to about three and a half hours (00:00, 10:59).

The regulatory story moved almost as fast as the physics. Boom says it broke the sound barrier on a Monday; by Tuesday, Scholl had an invitation to the White House; by Thursday, a model of the Overture airliner sat in the Oval Office, where he says it remains (16:35). The executive order lifting the 1973 overland ban took effect on June 6 of last year, after what Scholl describes as 115 days of work, which he calls slow by the standards of this particular sprint but likely faster than it would have gone under a different administration (17:14). Because an executive order can be reversed by a future president, Boom pushed Congress for something more durable: the Supersonic Legalization Act, which passed the House unanimously and has since cleared the Senate Commerce Committee, also unanimously (06:08).

A Number and a Date

Pressed onstage for the two things any airline passenger actually wants, a date and a price, Scholl gives both. A round-trip supersonic crossing of the Atlantic has a break-even fare of about $3,500, the point at which an airline neither makes nor loses money on the ticket; anything above that is profit (11:17). He expects Overture will sell for more, likely double or triple that figure, with the margin going to the airlines. On timing, Boom's internal goal is four years from the talk, but Scholl hedges toward 2030 as the realistic window for commercial service, framing the uncertainty as a feature rather than a flaw.

"It's more important to be fast than to be predictable." — Blake Scholl [11:17]

Even boomless cruise does not erase geography entirely. At Mach 1.3 over land, Scholl says a flight could leave New York at 9 a.m. and land in San Francisco at 9:30 a.m. local time, thanks to the three-hour time-zone gain (12:45). It is a smaller miracle than the transatlantic case, but it is the one that turns supersonic flight from a novelty for ocean crossings into something that reshapes how a country experiences its own size.

Scholl closes with a story about his four-year-old daughter, who has grown up watching rocket landing videos and, watching a model rocket he built her, was upset that it did not come back down to the pad on its own. He offers it as a bet on the next generation's baseline expectations: a world in which a six-hour flight across the United States sounds as strange to a child as an un-recovered rocket booster does to his daughter now.

"New York's not worth it if it takes six hours to get there." — Blake Scholl [15:16]

What makes Boom's pitch different from the usual founder optimism is that its riskiest bet, the engine, has already found a second customer before the first passenger ever boards. If the data-center business works as described, it does not just subsidize a supersonic jet. It puts Boom's most important piece of hardware through years of commercial testing on the ground, in stationary trailers, long before it has to prove itself at Mach 1.7 over the Atlantic. Scholl's line about the ground application is almost a throwaway, but it may be the most important sentence in the talk: the airplane needed the power business more than the power business needed the airplane.