- Hitachi Energy will invest $528 million in a power transformer plant in Gallman, Mississippi, projected to create more than 650 jobs.
- The agreement was signed September 15 in Houston as a joint U.S.-Japan announcement on investment in American manufacturing.
- Mississippi Governor Tate Reeves, Energy Secretary Chris Wright, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin and Hitachi Energy CEO Andreas Schierenbeck signed the agreement together.
- The project builds on the Japan-U.S. Strategic Investment Initiative, under which Hitachi had already pledged roughly $1 billion to expand U.S. transformer manufacturing.
Hitachi Energy is committing $528 million to build a new power transformer plant in Gallman, Mississippi, a project the company projects will create more than 650 jobs, under an agreement signed on stage during the second day of the G20 Energy Abundance Ministerial in Houston.
The deal lands as U.S. electricity demand climbs at a pace the grid hasn't faced in decades, driven by AI data centers and a federal push to manufacture critical grid equipment on American soil instead of relying on a strained global supply chain.
A Deal Built on an Existing Pledge
The Gallman commitment did not come out of nowhere. It extends an October 2025 memorandum of understanding Hitachi signed with the U.S. Department of Commerce, under which the company agreed to explore further expansion of Hitachi Energy's manufacturing activities on U.S. soil, tied to a roughly $1 billion pledge toward grid infrastructure and transformer capacity.
That memorandum sits inside the Japan-U.S. Strategic Investment Initiative, which the two governments formalized in March. According to the first batch of projects confirmed by Japan's Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the mechanism has already routed roughly $2.1 billion toward U.S. crude oil export infrastructure involving Mitsui O.S.K. Lines and Nippon Steel, about $600 million toward industrial synthetic diamond manufacturing, and an estimated $33.3 billion toward natural gas power generation for AI data centers backed by Toshiba, Hitachi, Mitsubishi Electric and SoftBank Group. Gallman now becomes a new entry in that same bilateral pipeline.
Why Mississippi, and Why Transformers
The choice of Mississippi is not sudden. Hitachi Energy has spent more than a year warning about a global shortage of power transformers, a bottleneck that in March 2025 already pushed the company to announce an additional $250 million for that same production line, with expansions specifically listed for Virginia, Missouri and Mississippi. That round itself built on a $6 billion investment announced in 2024, $1.5 billion of which was earmarked specifically to scale transformer manufacturing.
CEO Andreas Schierenbeck summed up the logic behind that push in March 2025: "Demand for transformers and grid infrastructure is rising at an unprecedented scale and pace." The same shortage — sharpened since by the AI data center boom — also drove a separate $1 billion investment that included a Virginia transformer factory, Utility Dive reported.
Reeves' Own Energy Push
Governor Reeves has been building toward a moment like this since 2025, when he launched Mississippi's Power Play, a state initiative aimed at cutting red tape and pulling energy manufacturing into Mississippi. The initiative was built around the same argument now underpinning the Gallman deal: that states willing to move fastest on permitting and site preparation stand to capture the manufacturing investment driven by the country's electricity crunch.
The Hitachi Energy agreement, coming roughly a year and a half after the company first flagged Mississippi as part of its expansion plans, fits squarely into that push and gives Reeves a concrete result to point to.
A Ministerial Overshadowed by Geopolitics
The signing happened against an unusual backdrop. The G20 Energy Abundance Ministerial, running through September 16, has drawn delegations from the world's largest economies — including China, India, Japan and Germany — alongside major oil producers such as Canada and Saudi Arabia, while the war in Iran continues to rattle global fuel markets. Washington even invited Venezuela's interim government to join the talks, and Russia confirmed it would send an official to the meeting as well, according to The Moscow Times.
Interior Secretary Doug Burgum used his own platform at the summit to rule out any ban on U.S. oil exports, telling attendees the administration intends to keep American crude flowing to global markets, The Epoch Times reported. Against that backdrop of oil diplomacy, the Hitachi Energy signing offered the administration something more tangible: real jobs and a physical plant tied to its alliance with Japan.
What Comes Next
Neither Hitachi Energy nor Governor Reeves' office had released a formal breakdown of the Gallman project — production capacity, construction timeline or an expected date for the plant to come online — details that typically follow this kind of joint announcement within days. For a state that has spent the past year courting energy manufacturers, the 650 jobs tied to the plant would mark one of Reeves' largest single wins yet under the Power Play banner.
