475 people build transformers in Copiah County, Mississippi, and by 2029 that number is set to pass 1,100.
What happened
Katherine Lin reported for Mississippi Today on Sept. 15 that Hitachi Energy will spend $528 million on a new transformer factory in Gallman, and Courtney Ann Jackson of WLOX reported from Copiah County the same day on what the project means to the people who live there. The company is buying 45 acres in the Copiah County Industrial Park, breaking ground late this year, and turning out transformers there in 2029.
The new plant sits about six and a half miles from Hitachi Energy's existing factory in Crystal Springs, where the company has been building equipment for 70 years. That plant employs 475 people today, and it makes small power transformers. The Gallman site is more than twice its size and will carry a wider range of units. When production moves, Crystal Springs does not go dark: it converts to warehousing and training, which is the part of this announcement that says the most about the next decade of hiring in this county.
The Mississippi Development Authority is backing the project through MFLEX, the state's flexible tax incentive program, along with site development and infrastructure work. Copiah County is contributing as well. AccelerateMS, the state workforce office, has committed to building out training for the skilled manufacturing roles the plant will need. Hitachi Energy announced the investment at the G20 Energy Abundance Ministerial in Houston, with Gov. Tate Reeves and federal energy officials on hand.
Why it counts
A power transformer is the steel and copper box that changes voltage: up, so electricity can travel a long way without bleeding off as heat, and back down, so it can safely reach a substation, a factory floor or a street. Nothing on the grid moves without one. Every new data center campus, every new gas or nuclear unit, every rebuilt distribution line in a growing suburb needs transformers, and for several years now American utilities and the contractors who build for them have been queued up behind each other waiting on delivery.
That is why a factory is the story here and not just a number. The fix for a supply line that cannot keep up is not a policy memo, it is a building in Gallman with people inside it. Winders, welders, assemblers, test technicians, quality inspectors, electrical engineers, maintenance crews: those are the jobs a transformer plant runs on, and most of them are learned on the job or in a two year program rather than a four year degree.
The Crystal Springs conversion to training space is the quiet detail worth circling. A company that plans to teach people how to build transformers on a dedicated site, a few miles from where they will work, is planning a pipeline, not a hiring spike. Paired with AccelerateMS, that is what a trade pipeline looks like on the ground: recruit locally, train locally, keep the paycheck in the county.
Hitachi Energy is blunt about why it is spending the money: advanced manufacturing, data centers, industrial electrification and grid modernization are all pulling on the same equipment at once, and the company wants more of that equipment built in the country where it will be installed. For a plant manager in Mississippi that abstraction has a concrete form, which is a production schedule with orders behind it for years, and that is the condition under which a company hires apprentices instead of contractors.
It also puts Mississippi inside a national buildout rather than beside it. Hitachi Energy is running the same play in Virginia, Tennessee and Pennsylvania, and Gallman is the biggest piece of it.
"The ripple effect of 650 jobs means more people living here, working here." Carrie Barnhart, owner of Making It Southern in Copiah County, to WLOX
The numbers
$528 million, the investment, which Hitachi Energy calls its largest single commitment in the United States.
654, new jobs, the figure the Mississippi Development Authority put on the project. Hitachi Energy's own release says more than 700. Use the state number until hiring proves otherwise.
475, people working at the Crystal Springs plant right now.
45, acres in the Copiah County Industrial Park.
70, years Hitachi Energy and its predecessors have operated in Mississippi.
$1.5 billion and roughly 1,600 jobs, the company's wider American manufacturing program, which also covers Virginia, Tennessee and Pennsylvania.
Late 2026 to 2029, construction start to first production.
3.5% a year, the rate McKinsey expects United States electricity demand to grow through 2040, the figure cited in Mississippi Today's coverage.
What comes next
The first wave of work is construction, and it is not on Hitachi Energy's payroll. Site work, concrete, structural steel, electrical and mechanical contractors: that is local and regional trade labor, hired through contractors across the next two to three years, and it lands well before a single transformer ships.
Production hiring runs on a longer clock, and there are three things worth watching. First, whether AccelerateMS and Hitachi Energy put a named program with an intake schedule behind the training commitment, because a curriculum with start dates is what turns 654 into real applications from people in Copiah, Hinds and Lincoln counties. Second, whether the Copiah County Board of Supervisors moves the infrastructure work, water, sewer, roads and site power, on the timeline the plant needs. Third, what the MFLEX terms look like when they are final: that program is administered by the Mississippi Development Authority under statute the Legislature wrote, and the job count and wage commitments inside it are the public's yardstick later.
The Bottom Line
Mississippi did not land an office park. It landed a factory that makes the one piece of hardware nearly everyone building on the American grid is waiting for, in a county where the company already knows the workforce and the workforce already knows the company. 475 becomes more than 1,100, the old plant becomes the school, and the work stays in Copiah County.
Sources: Mississippi Today, Katherine Lin | WLOX, Courtney Ann Jackson | Mississippi Development Authority | Hitachi Energy
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