Urgent order calls from European buyers have become the daily background noise for Chinese transformer factories. "Can the delivery time be shortened from 12 months to 9 months?" Similar urgent requests have been emerging intensively since the beginning of this year. Data from the General Administration of Customs shows that in the first nine months of 2025, China's transformer export value soared to 46.48 billion yuan, with the European market surging by 138% year-on-year, and even US data centers are willing to pay a 20% premium to rush orders. This device, once regarded as a bulky iron lump, has now become the "lifesaver" for the global power grid upgrade.
The shortage of transformers is triggering a chain reaction. In the US, over 70% of transformers have been in service for more than 25 years, with some equipment "over-serviced" for up to 40 years, resulting in a shortage of up to 30% of transformers nationwide by 2025. In Texas, an AI Data center experienced frequent downtime due to unstable voltage, and finally managed to alleviate the crisis by outbidding others to secure a batch of custom transformers from China at a higher price. The situation in Europe is equally severe, with local manufacturers generally having delivery times of over 18 months. After waiting fruitlessly for half a year, an industrial park in Germany turned to Chinese suppliers and paid an expedited fee to maintain the progress of its power grid renovation.
Spark demand
The explosion on the demand side has caused the gap to continue to widen. Training an AI model of GPT-6 level once requires the decentralized deployment of 100,000 GPU chips, as centralized startup may directly overwhelm local power grids. Google's large language model PaLM consumes as much electricity in a single day as 118,000 US households, and these "power guzzlers" rely on dedicated transformers for voltage stabilization. Meanwhile, global electric vehicle production reached 17.3 million units in 2024, with each vehicle requiring 5-6 transformers, and the construction of charging pile networks has further spurred massive demand for power distribution equipment. The International Energy Agency predicts that global grid investment will exceed $600 billion by 2030, and transformers, as the "transfer stations" of electricity, are in short supply.
Create a comeback
China's transformer production capacity accounts for more than 60% of the global total, with companies such as TBEA and Jinpan Technology firmly ranked among the world's top ten. The key lies in its complete industrial chain advantages: from Baosteel's high-end silicon steel sheets to insulating paper and tap changers, 100% self-production reduces costs by 20% compared to imports. In the Jiaozhou Changzhou industrial cluster, if an assembly plant runs short of cores, neighboring factories can deliver the same day, whereas their European and American counterparts need to coordinate shipments across states or even countries. This efficiency allows Chinese enterprises to compress delivery times to 10-12 months, with urgent orders deliverable within 3 months, while foreign manufacturers alone require a six-month process just to modify parameters.
Stereotype
Chinese transformers are not synonymous with 'low price.' The average export price has risen from $12,000 per unit in 2020 to $20,800 per unit in 2025, with high-end models doubling in price. Customized solutions for different scenarios have become a competitive advantage: African projects are adapted to high-temperature and high-humidity environments, European data centers are equipped with intelligent control systems, and the world's first 500 kV plant oil transformer put into operation in Guangzhou has broken foreign environmental technology monopolies. In 2025, EDF (French Grid Company) placed a single order for 50 large Chinese transformers, accounting for one-third of its annual procurement volume.
Flexible Breakthrough
Faced with the U.S. policy of imposing a 104% tariff on Chinese transformers, Chinese enterprises have conducted transshipment trade through their Mexican subsidiaries to circumvent restrictions by adopting 'localized production'. Jinpan Technology utilizes the Shelter model in Mexico for the middle and later stages of dry-type transformer processing, with products supplied directly to the U.S. market. Meanwhile, U.S. domestic production can only meet 20% of the demand, ultimately leading the U.S. to approve partial tariff exemptions.
Synchronous outbreak
While the overseas market is booming, domestic UHV projects are intensively commencing. The UHV project from Southeast Tibet to Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao will be launched in September 2025, with the cost of a single UHV transformer exceeding 20 million yuan, and the overall project's transformer demand amounting to approximately 1 billion yuan. Transformers manufactured in Baoding have already captured 33% of the national UHV market share and have developed a special traction transformer for maglev trains with a speed of 600 km/h.
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