Howmet Aerospace slides 7.5% after SpaceX announces in-house turbine production

Howmet Aerospace had its worst day in over a year after Elon Musk casually dropped a bombshell on X: SpaceX is building its own foundry to cast turbine blades. Shares of HWM fell 7.5% on August 31, closing at $244.95, the steepest single-session decline since April 2025. Wall Street’s verdict? Overreaction. Two major banks are calling the dip a buying opportunity, arguing that SpaceX’s turbine ambitions are years away from actually denting Howmet’s business. What Musk actually said On August 30, Musk announced that SpaceX is setting up a dedicated foundry in Bastrop, Texas, to cast turbine blades and vanes in-house. The stated goal is to break the production bottleneck that currently plagues turbine casting. Musk claimed the move could shave up to 18 months off the deployment timeline for natural-gas turbines. The intended application is powering AI data centers, with SpaceX eyeing roughly 20 GW of energy capacity for its projects. Why the market panicked Howmet Aerospace is one of the world’s premier manufacturers of high-temperature turbine airfoils, the precision-engineered blades that sit inside jet engines and industrial gas turbines. The company operates in an extremely conce...