Hitachi Energy plans to invest $528 million in a new electrical-transformer manufacturing facility in Copiah County, a project Mississippi officials say will create 654 jobs and become the company’s largest U.S. investment to date. The Mississippi Development Authority announced the project Tuesday.
The company will buy a 45-acre site at the Copiah County Industrial Park in Gallman, build a factory and install new manufacturing equipment. Construction is expected to begin later in 2026, while transformer production is scheduled to start in 2029. Those dates mean the employment and production gains will arrive in stages rather than immediately. MDA said the expansion will also broaden the range of small power transformers produced domestically for customers across North America.
Hitachi Energy already operates a small-power-transformer plant in nearby Crystal Springs with 475 employees. Its corporate announcement says the Gallman factory will be more than twice the size of the existing plant, more than double production capacity and eventually receive production transferred from Crystal Springs. The two sites are about 6.5 miles apart.
Job totals and state assistance
The state and company described the expected workforce differently. Mississippi’s development agency counted 654 new jobs, while Hitachi Energy said the new facility would create more than 700. The distinction may reflect different counting methods, but neither announcement provided a hiring schedule or occupational breakdown. Prospective applicants should therefore treat the totals as project commitments, not current openings.
Mississippi is supporting the project through its Flexible Tax Incentive, known as MFLEX, along with site-development and infrastructure assistance. Copiah County also is participating, although the state announcement did not disclose a total public-incentive value. That missing figure will matter when measuring the project’s eventual cost per job and the public return on the investment.
The factory will make power transformers, equipment used to change voltage levels as electricity moves through the grid. Hitachi Energy said the Mississippi project anchors an approximately $1.5 billion U.S. manufacturing-expansion program that also includes work in Pennsylvania, Virginia and Tennessee. Reuters independently reported that the $528 million factory is the company’s largest single investment within that national expansion.
For Mississippi, the immediate effects are concentrated in land preparation, construction and workforce planning. The larger economic test will come closer to 2029: whether the plant opens on schedule, how many of the promised jobs are filled by state residents, what wages those jobs pay and whether transferring production changes employment at the existing Crystal Springs site.
The project is consequential beyond Copiah County because it adds domestic capacity for equipment needed across electric utilities, industrial facilities and data centers. Still, the announcement is a development commitment rather than completed output. State and local officials will need to track construction milestones, public assistance and hiring against the figures released this week.
