US power companies are locked in a scramble for the heavy electrical gear that keeps the lights on, as a wave of artificial-intelligence data centres pushes demand for transformers, turbines and switchgear well beyond what factories can supply.
Lead times once measured in months now run into years, and developers are fighting over the same scarce production slots as the build-out strains data-centre power and reshapes local grids.
The tightest bottleneck is in large power transformers, the substation workhorses that raise and lower voltage across the network. Delivery windows that sat at roughly 24 to 30 months before the boom have stretched to three to five years for the biggest units, industry trackers say, with average US lead times now running near 128 weeks.
The strain does not stop there. Switchgear, the protective equipment that isolates faults and routes power, is effectively spoken for through 2028 at some suppliers, and analysts warn that medium-voltage kit and generator step-up units face similar multi-year queues.
Turbines are scarcer still. GE Vernova’s gas-turbine backlog hit 100 gigawatts in the first quarter of 2026, and the company expects to reach at least 110GW of orders and slot reservations by year-end, with delivery windows at the major makers booked years out and some frames sold into the next decade.
