Wood Mackenzie: US power equipment market to triple to $65 billion by 2030

The US market for power plant equipment will triple by 2030 and reach $65 billion. Analytics firm Wood Mackenzie names data centers serving artificial intelligence infrastructure as the main growth driver.

What the Wood Mackenzie report shows

Wood Mackenzie has recorded an unprecedented turn in the American energy industry. According to the analysts, by 2030 the US will triple its spending on equipment for generating, transmitting and distributing electricity. The market is currently valued at roughly $21-22 billion and will grow to $65 billion by the end of the decade.

Data centers may account for up to 40% of total investment in new power equipment. This is not just a "noticeable" segment; it is a structural shift. A few years ago, data centers were considered a niche consumer of electricity. Today they are becoming the anchor customer of the entire industry, from generation to the last mile of distribution.

In absolute terms, that is $26 billion from data center demand alone, more than the entire current US power equipment market.

Why AI needs so much electricity

Modern language models are trained on clusters of tens of thousands of GPUs. A single such cluster draws hundreds of megawatts continuously, comparable to the consumption of a small industrial city. After training comes inference: the model running constantly to answer requests from millions of users.

The largest technology companies, including Microsoft, Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud and Meta*, have announced multiyear programs to build new data centers across the country. Total investment runs to hundreds of billions of dollars. Each facility requires its own high-voltage substation, kilometers of cable, power transformers and backup power sources.

Demand is growing faster than the supply chain can respond. Lead times for power transformers in the US have grown from a few months to two to three years. Expanding production quickly is impossible: these are multiyear, capital-intensive projects.

Who stands to gain

The tripling of the market creates specific growth opportunities for several categories of players:

• Power transformer manufacturers: the scarcest segment; order books are full years ahead
• Cable companies: every large data center requires kilometers of high-voltage cable
• Engineering and construction contractors: design and installation of substations and connection points to the main grids
• UPS and backup generator makers: backup power is mandatory by regulation for any data center
• Energy storage companies: battery storage systems serve as a buffer during peak loads

Government support is growing in parallel. US authorities are subsidizing construction of new generating capacity, including small modular nuclear reactors, to provide stable baseload power for energy-hungry AI facilities.

What it means

The AI revolution needs more than chips and algorithms: it is built on tons of copper, steel and transformer oil. Physical energy infrastructure is becoming as strategic an asset as the language models themselves. Companies that can deliver electrical equipment quickly will be at the center of the next investment cycle, regardless of who ultimately wins the AI model race.

*Meta has been designated an extremist organization and is banned in Russia.