Howmet Aerospace Inc. Jefferies Global Industrials Conference 2026
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My name is Sheila Kahyaoglu with the Jefferies Aerospace, Defense and Airlines Equity Research team, in case you are on the webcast. And we have John Plant, who is Chairman and CEO of Howmet. John, do you like what I have in my hand here for the first question?
Is that something you stole?
I did. I stole it from Whitehall, Michigan. It is a piece of a core at a very impressive facility, and I keep it in my bag actually all the time as a little bit of a lucky charm. And I thought, what better way to start off than say, "I stole a piece of a core," and it seems like lots of people are trying to steal a piece of your core, whether it is SpaceX Ooh or GE.
So what is I still think you should hand that back to us.
No, no. I actually have a spare one in case you did try to take this away from me that I have secretly locked up in my jewelry box. How do we think about your next move from here?
Are you talking about me personally or the company or what?
I don't know. You- I do not know.
You just want to tantalize you with all the opportunity you have to consider. I am inviting you to get more specific.
How do you think about my interest in war games from here and how the scenarios play out?
You said on your office call- Well, I was rather shocked at one of your suggestions.
I decided that you really had lost it in your positioning. That is me and the way I think about you, Sheila Kahyaoglu. She who steals parts from us. My assumption is you are referring to some recent announcement, SpaceX, and that was a topic du jour a week or so ago.
You had another chance to follow up.
Yeah. I never want to avoid anything. I think to myself, "Yeah, let's talk about it." It's far better that I do, because you'll just be relentless in following up questions if I don't. My first thought about it is, let me try to put the whole issue of power provision into, and the demand seen by turbine manufacturers for whether it's provision for oil and gas pipeline, or whether it's into data centers, and what is all that about, and where are we in that journey. I think the most important and acute aspect of it is the demand evolution in the data center market, because that clearly is a data center without power is useless, and availability of turbines has never been less against a greater need. Where are we? I think I've got to start off with trying to make sure that we're all level set on the nature of today's data center demand.
Historically, if you go back, let's say the storage of your images on your iPhone or your email in a data center, that was more, let's call it plain vanilla demand, and that was using, I'll say standard merchant-available chips, very different to the data center demand which is really emanating today from the likes of the software being written by OpenAI or by Anthropic, and now I'd say data centers that are being built out with very advanced GPU chips, let's say using NVIDIA or custom silicon. You've got very much yesterday's, let's say more standard silicon, and tomorrow it's custom silicon. You've got air-cooled versus air and liquid-cooled.
You've got stable power demands for yesterday's data center to highly variable power demands for the more exacting, and certainly topic of the day of where data centers are. That also influences the turbine selection and also the technologies that go into that. When you've got variable power requirements, it puts very different loads on the turbine compared to, let's say, the more stable plain vanilla demand. Not only is more power required, but it's the type of power that's there. You get very different answers to what's the preferred turbines that service this market beyond even the electricity from the grid, but what are you putting in there? It's also driving the nature of, let's say, not just for the use of natural gas, but also the robustness of the set of turbine blades.
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