SpaceX Moves Into Gas-Turbine Manufacturing With New Bastrop, Texas Foundry

Reporting on August 30, 2026 revealed SpaceX is building a foundry to cast blades and vanes for large industrial gas turbines next to its existing Starlink satellite factory in Bastrop, Texas, roughly 30 miles from Austin. SpaceX quietly acquired about 830 acres of surrounding land between March and June 2026, and satellite imagery shows two new buildings that were not present a year earlier. Musk said in-house casting could accelerate delivery of natural-gas turbines — a severely bottlenecked component made at scale by only four companies worldwide, with order backlogs into 2030 — by as much as 18 months, addressing power shortages for AI data centers (including SpaceX's own Starmind AI1 orbital compute ambitions) as well as supplying castings for Raptor engine turbopumps. SpaceX has posted multiple Bastrop job listings for the effort, including senior operations, materials, automation and tooling engineers. The move drew scrutiny from reporters who noted a precedent at Musk's xAI Colossus data center in Memphis, where the NAACP has accused the company of running gas turbines without required permits or pollution controls, and cited a Virginia study estimating that eight turbines at a single site could cause 3.4-6.5 additional premature deaths a year and $53-99 million in annual health costs, with marginalized communities bearing the heaviest exposure — concerns not yet raised specifically against the Bastrop site.