Blake Scholl told Y Combinator that Boom Supersonic will build its own 40,000 lb thrust engine after the Rolls-Royce breakup left the company unfundable, and will sell a 42-megawatt turbine version to AI data centers to pay for the Overture airliner.
Outsourcing the engine was "one of the most disastrous decisions I ever made," Scholl said.
The split started at a Rolls-Royce board meeting in early 2022, Scholl said, when the CEO was fired and the next-generation platform behind Boom’s proposed engine was dropped without telling Boom. Boom started its own engine work in mid-2022, Scholl said, was publicly dumped by Rolls-Royce in August 2022 around the American Airlines pre-order that followed United, and unveiled its in-house strategy at the end of 2022. That move became "the best thing we ever did," Scholl said, because optimizing the engine solved boomless cruise six months before the team realized it, and Scholl claimed there would be no boomless passenger flight without it. XB-1 flew supersonic in early 2025, Scholl said.
The second business is power. Scholl said a modified jet becomes a 42-megawatt turbine, with 24 units covering a 1-gigawatt data center, and said early investor Sam Altman expressed interest in the turbines for AI. Scholl said he spotted the AI energy shortage on Twitter in March 2025 and raised money at the end of 2025 on the turbine plan, which he said can self fund the airplane with money left over.
That pitch now faces a schedule check. Reported by Ars Technica, Boom has put a Colorado factory behind gas turbines for data centers while the United Airlines CEO doubts Overture will be ready by 2029, a date Boom has still circled for airlines that hold pre-orders.
For travelers, the change is concrete if it ships. Scholl described an Overture cabin with no middle seats, a 5-minute boarding goal, and a Wi-Fi antenna built into the fuselage instead of a draggy hump. For operators, Scholl said Boom built Make Boom software to design an airplane around an engine and run full flight simulations, a tool that recovered 1,000 miles of range lost to the new cabin on a 4,000-mile airplane, Scholl said. The practical test is whether a jet shop can deliver power blocks on data center timelines and hit its own goal of going from design idea to high-performance turbine part in 24 hours.
