Source

@Gaurab posts a long single-tweet primary on the actual physical bottleneck under the gas-turbine sold-out-til-2030 thesis. The turbine OEMs (GE, Siemens, Mitsubishi) are the visible chokepoint — order books stretch to 2029, prices have nearly tripled since 2019, "every AI data center needs power and every gas plant needs a turbine" — but the real constraint sits one layer upstream: the blade.

Specs from the post:

• Each blade survives operating in gas 500°C above the melting point of the metal it is made from, spinning at up to 20,000 RPM under 10,000g of centrifugal force.
• Each blade is grown as a single crystal of nickel superalloy, pulled through a vacuum furnace at 3 mm per minute.
• One set of blades costs $600,000 and takes 90 weeks to grow.
• Same metallurgy class as modern jet engines.
• Only 3 companies on Earth can build them.

China case study: spent $42B trying to catch up. Bought a Russian fighter engine, took it apart, copied every part. Their copy ran 30 hours between overhauls vs 400 for the original. Modern Western engines run 4,000. Closing line: "You can reverse engineer the shape of a turbine blade. You cannot reverse engineer 60 years of metallurgy."