China’s Transformer Factories Are Drowning in AI Orders—Here’s Why That Matters

• Global Market Share: China accounts for ~60% of global transformer production capacity.
• Order Backlog: Key data center transformer orders are backlogged until 2027.
• US Lead Times: Delivery times have surged from 50 weeks to 127 weeks.
• Export Growth: China’s transformer exports grew 36% year-on-year in 2025.
• Industry Scale: Over 3,000 enterprises operate in China’s transformer sector.

The global race for AI computing power just created an unexpected bottleneck.

And it’s not semiconductors or GPUs—it’s something far more fundamental: electrical transformers.

Right now, transformer factories across China are operating at maximum capacity with order backlogs stretching all the way to 2027. This isn’t just interesting factory gossip. It’s a signal that the infrastructure underpinning the entire AI boom is being stress-tested in real time.

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The Explosive Growth of Global AI Computing Power

The construction of global AI computing power has shifted into a completely different gear.

And here’s the thing most people miss: power infrastructure is now the limiting factor, not compute itself.

High-power, highly stable power supplies have become the “lifeline” for computing clusters. That means electrical transformers—components that quietly convert and regulate electricity—have jumped from being background infrastructure to a core bottleneck in the entire AI supply chain.

Investigations across Guangdong (Guangdong 广东) and Jiangsu (Jiangsu 江苏) provinces tell a clear story:

• Many transformer factories are operating at full capacity
• Business orders specifically for data centers are backlogged until 2027
• Production lines started the year running at maximum load and haven’t stopped

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Inside China’s Transformer Production Boom

In Foshan (Foshan 佛山), Guangdong, one electrical equipment enterprise’s production lines tell the whole story.

They’re running at maximum capacity.

Warehouses and parking lots overflow with transformer products waiting for delivery. The backlog isn’t theoretical—it’s physical.

According to the head of the R&D center at this Foshan-based electrical company:

Orders increased by 70% to 80% year-on-year within the first month of this year.

Let that sink in. 70-80% growth in a single month compared to the same period last year.

The production lines have been operating at full load since the very first day of the annual opening. No ramp-up. No easing in. Just straight into overdrive.

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Global Supply Shortages Are Creating Massive Delivery Delays

Here’s where it gets wild: the explosive growth of AI computing centers worldwide has turned transformers into a scarce resource.

In the United States market, delivery lead times tell the story:

• 50 weeks was previously standard
• Now it’s stretched to as long as 127 weeks
• That’s a 154% increase in waiting time

For context, 127 weeks is roughly 2.4 years of waiting for a transformer order.

At another electrical equipment firm in Foshan, the pattern is consistent. Export orders for dry-type transformers—the kind primarily used in data centers—are experiencing rapid growth across every market.

This “full production” status isn’t just a Foshan phenomenon.

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The Yangtze River Delta: China’s Transformer Hub

The same story is playing out across the Yangtze River Delta region.

At a transformer factory in Jiangsu (Jiangsu 江苏), the order book is filled through the end of 2027.

Let’s be clear about what that means: if you placed an order today for a transformer from this factory, you’d be waiting roughly 3 years for delivery.

But there’s more happening here than just domestic demand. China recently achieved something significant on the global stage:

China’s first fully insulated, ultra-high-voltage, large-capacity transformer was recently shipped from this region to the North American market.

This represents a shift in the competitive landscape. High-end transformer technology—traditionally dominated by Western manufacturers—is now being produced and exported from China at scale.

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China’s Dominance in Global Transformer Production

The scale of China’s transformer industry is staging.

There are approximately 3,000 enterprises operating in China’s transformer industry alone.

But the export numbers are what really matter:

In 2025, the total value of China’s transformer exports reached ¥64.6 billion RMB ($9.04 billion USD), representing a nearly 36% increase compared to 2024.

That’s not incremental growth. That’s explosive expansion in a single year.

Cai Yiqing (Cai Yiqing 蔡义清), Secretary General of the Electric Power Equipment Branch of the China Electricity Council (Zhongguo Dianli Qiye Lianhehui 中国电力企业联合会), puts it directly:

“China has become the world’s largest transformer producer. We have built the world’s most complete transformer production system, possessing the ‘hard strength’ of an independent and controllable industry chain. Our production capacity now accounts for approximately 60% of the global total.”

60% of global transformer production capacity.

That’s not just market share—that’s structural dominance.

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What This Means for the AI Infrastructure Race

The transformer bottleneck reveals something important about the current state of AI infrastructure development.

Everyone’s focused on chips, data centers, and compute capacity. But the unglamorous reality is that power delivery is now the constraining factor.

The fact that Chinese transformer factories have orders booked until 2027 tells us something else: global demand for AI computing power is far outpacing supply expectations.

Companies building data centers aren’t just planning for next year. They’re planning for a future where AI infrastructure is so critical that they’re locking in component orders years in advance.

And they’re doing it at record volumes.

The transformer shortage is a leading indicator. When power infrastructure becomes the bottleneck, you know demand for the downstream product—AI computing capacity—is absolutely explosive.

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The Takeaway

The global computing power expansion is accelerating faster than most supply chains can handle.

Chinese transformer factories are drowning in orders. Delivery times in the US have tripled. And the industry is operating at maximum capacity with no relief in sight until 2027.

This isn’t a constraint that will disappear quickly. It’s a structural reality of how fast AI infrastructure is being built right now.

If you’re thinking about the AI infrastructure race, pay attention to the transformers. They’re telling you exactly how urgent the competition for computing power really is.

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References

• Global Computing Power Construction Accelerates, Chinese Transformer Factory Orders Backlogged to 2027 – CCTV News (Yangshi Xinwen 央视新闻)
• Industry Statistics and Data – China Electricity Council (Zhongguo Dianli Qiye Lianhehui 中国电力企业联合会)
• China’s Transformer Export Growth and Market Trends – East Money (Dongfang Caifu 东方财富)