40,000 MW of Power Is Sitting in a Tucson Boneyard

• THE GRID

In the Sonoran Desert, thousands of retired jets sit in neat rows. They call these places boneyards. The engines haven't fired in years.

Now those engines are powering AI data centers.

The New York Times reported this week that firms are stripping turbines from old aircraft. They rebuild them as gas-fired generators. And data centers are buying every one they can get.

I had to read the details twice.

ProEnergy, a Missouri firm, leads the pack. It takes GE turbines from retired Boeing 747s and converts them to power units. Each one makes 50 megawatts. Enough to light 15,000 homes.

Elon Musk's xAI already runs eight of them in Mississippi. State permits show those units can emit carbon monoxide at twice the rate of other turbines on the same site. Dirtier power. But fast power.

FTAI Aviation took it further. The jet-engine leasing firm launched a division called FTAI Power. In July, its joint venture signed a $1.5 billion deal to supply converted turbines to a data center developer. FTAI's president David Moreno told investors on a call: "Customers want units, now."

How did we get here? Grid waits stretch for years. GE Vernova's new gas turbines are mostly sold out through 2030.

Transformers have four-year lead times. The bottleneck isn't cash. It's watts.

So the industry went to airplane graveyards.

The scale is real. The EIA said engines from 4,000 military aircraft parked at one Tucson base could yield 40,000 megawatts. That's more than some states can generate in total.

Elon Musk just triggered his most audacious plan yet.

Wall Street legend Larry Benedict says it’s bigger than Tesla, xAI, and SpaceX combined – and could cost up to $119 billion.

Discover the ticker Larry Benedict believes could move first.

Pinal Airpark, an hour from that base, stores nearly 300 planes on 20,000 acres. When a retired jet arrives, the engines come off first. They're often worth more than the rest of the plane.

Boom Supersonic — the startup chasing supersonic flight — is now building turbines for data centers too. SpaceX bought a mobile gas turbine maker. The race for power has left the grid behind.

An attorney with the Southern Environmental Law Center said generation "should be getting cleaner over time, not dirtier."

He's right. But the market cares about speed right now. Not clean.

When the most futuristic industry on Earth runs on airplane graveyards, the grid isn't just slow. It's already lost.

• VOLTAGE

On October 30, the NRC did something rare. It finished its final safety review of X-Energy's Xe-100 reactor.

That's a 320-megawatt gas-cooled unit. It's planned for Dow's Long Mott site in Texas. Amazon backs the company. X-Energy raised $1.1 billion in its IPO earlier this year.

The final safety evaluation clears both reviews needed for a construction permit. X-Energy says the permit could come as early as Q1 2027. If it does, Long Mott becomes the first grid-scale advanced reactor built in America.

Then Wedbush dropped a bomb. On November 3, the bank launched coverage of six nuclear stocks. The split was sharp.

NuScale got an Underperform rating. Price target: $5.

Analyst Seth Basham's logic was clear. NuScale lost its only US project in 2023. It still has no site.

X-Energy? Outperform. Oklo? Outperform. Nano Nuclear? Also Outperform — its fourth-gen design is already at the NRC permit stage.

The SMR sector has a growing divide. Firms with real sites, real backers, and real regulatory wins are pulling away. The rest are fading.

X-Energy has all three. A site at Dow. A backer in Amazon. And the NRC's stamp in the bag.

NuScale trades like a hope stock. X-Energy trades like an infrastructure play.

If you're betting on small reactors, bet on the ones with a shovel date — not a slide deck.

• WIRED IN

Tuesday’s results were barely final before the market started trading them. Four signals, one session — and the grid names were in the middle of all of it.