Boom Founder Blake Scholl: Don't Let Doomsayers Restrain AI
Blake Scholl, founder of Boom Supersonic, stated that artificial intelligence will not eliminate humanity, but doomsayers have the opportunity to restrain the most significant human advancement since the steam engine, which must not be allowed to happen. The post did not specify particular bills, models, or companies.
Scholl's company aims for the supersonic passenger aircraft Overture, with its verification aircraft XB-1 expected to break the sound barrier in January 2025. Subsequently, they adapted the Symphony technology, which shares a lineage with the passenger aircraft, into a 42-megawatt natural gas turbine called Superpower, prioritizing supply for AI data centers. Crusoe has ordered 29 units, totaling approximately $1.25 billion, amounting to about 1.21 gigawatts, to support the aircraft development. He has publicly noted that the power grid cannot keep up with computing power and has communicated with OpenAI regarding power bottlenecks. The team emphasizes using software and models to compress aircraft design cycles. If safety regulations and export controls tighten around models and computing power, it will simultaneously affect his power customers and his own design tools. He defines doomsaying here as political and regulatory forces that may hinder deployment, rather than verifiable physical predictions.
In market mechanisms, the buyers are data centers needing power and aviation customers wanting supersonic travel, while the seller is Boom, which sells the same thermal machinery to two demand curves; the driving force is to frame alignment debates as constraints on industrial revolution-level tools. Funds flow from turbine orders to aircraft projects. Beneficiaries are computing power vendors needing rapid installations, while those advocating for slowing down frontier deployments face pressure, as do the timelines for passenger aircraft that still need to pass airworthiness and emissions approvals.
Source: Public Information
ABAB AI Insight
Those selling power to training clusters fear the safety narrative becoming a barrier to installation permits. The steam engine metaphorically frames regulation as a Luddite movement, while positioning their gas turbines as allies of progress. The shift of the supersonic company to sell 42-megawatt units indicates that the real bottleneck for AI lies in power and turbines, not in philosophical papers. Orders preceding passenger aircraft signify using data center cash flow to purchase aviation dreams, locking the founder's rhetoric into "must accelerate."
The capital path is a dual-use engine: 80% of parts are shared, with civil aviation certification cycles being long and power plant acceptance being short. Whoever can connect to the grid first will give supersonic a lifeline. OpenAI investors and power customers appear on the same call, rewriting product prioritization. If doomsaying translates into computing power limits, turbine orders and design software will slow down simultaneously.
Similar to how visible nuclear energy has been delayed by safety narratives, and cryptocurrency has framed regulation as stifling innovation. The industry phase sees infrastructure companies joining alignment debates because their revenue is tied to deployment speed. Passenger aircraft remain constrained by noise and emissions, while power plants are affected by methane and site selection; these two sets of regulations will not be canceled by the same steam engine narrative.
Structurally, this belongs to the struggle for discourse power in technological substitution: framing deceleration as a loss of civilization. The mechanism is that the thirst for computing power turns aviation heat engines into energy commodities, with founders using historical analogies to protect orders; alignment risks are defined as political risks, while power shortages are defined as engineering problems, the latter having quotes, the former not.
ABAB News · Law of Cognition
Those selling power to models fear the models being limited in power
Once the steam engine metaphor is out, regulation is framed as regression
Products that connect to the grid first will redefine the company's risk definitions