The AI boom is catalyzing the build-out of some of the biggest, baddest power lines this country has ever seen. These extra-high-voltage wires can carry up to six times the power of other big lines, and they’re one of the only feasible ways to accommodate multigigawatt data centers on a crowded grid.

In the last few months, grid authorities in Texas, the mid-Atlantic and the Midwest have greenlit $75 billion in transmission expansions, mostly featuring massive, alternating-current power lines carrying a sizzling 765 kilovolts, the highest operating voltage in the U.S. The new projects will quintuple the extent of these electron superhighways from just over 2,000 miles today to 10,000 miles in a handful of years, said suppliers of the projects.

Mid-Atlantic grid operator PJM Interconnection got approval in February for an $11.8 billion plan for high-voltage wires, many 765 kV, that cross Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Virginia and Maryland. The Texas grid operator, Electric Reliability Council of Texas, approved two plans totaling $33 billion for separate networks in the east and west of the state. And two Midwest grid operators, Southwest Power Pool and Midcontinent Independent System Operator, approved projects with 765 kV backbones worth more than $30 billion combined that would site high voltage from Oklahoma to New Mexico and from South Dakota to the Great Lakes.

We report here exclusively that Texas is poised to consider a third extra-high-voltage network in the Panhandle area, to serve over 25 gigawatts of potential new data center load just in North Texas.

Such souped-up power lines have towered over the master-planned community of New Albany, Ohio, and the surrounding region for decades. The utility, American Electric Power, which pioneered 765 kV in the 1960s, built its hidden-away central command center here and turned New Albany into a showcase for the delivery of highly concentrated power. Its industrial district is now teeming with hyperscale data centers: Meta Platforms, Amazon and Google rushed to expand their existing campuses here in the early days of the AI boom, in 2023 and 2024. Locals had fun holding up fluorescent bulbs near the intense electromagnetic field the lines created and watching them glow.

I toured New Albany in 2024, just as AEP was selling out of high-voltage capacity, and craned my neck to see wire spooled onto soaring towers near Intel’s new chip factory, which also came for the big volts.

Running the power grid is an exercise in moving electricity from where it is abundant, such as power plants or big solar fields, to where it is needed, meaning cities or data centers. Doing that well keeps the lights on and costs down.

That makes high-voltage lines a no-brainer in a fast-electrifying world because they can carry so much more power through existing rights of way, with far lower loss of electricity than older high-voltage wires, which carry 345 kV to 500 kV. (765 kV powerlines can carry up to six times the power that 345 kV lines do.) High-voltage power lines also reduce the number of towers and wires needed for the grid, which no one wants crossing their land.

“It’s like the interstate highways—we need bulk transportation, so that every part of the grid works. We couldn’t have Amazon delivering our stuff if we couldn’t move a lot of goods easily on the interstate,” said Brian Janous, a former Microsoft vice president of energy who now has a business that finds powered sites for data centers. “It’s the same with the grid: If you’re going to expand demand, you want to expand high-voltage transmission.”

Data centers aren’t the only reason for this investment wave, but firm commitments from large data center customers reassure regulators that badly needed power lines will get paid for.

The projects mean boom times for a small number of companies that already have the expertise to build them. AEP owns and operates 90% of the existing 765 kV network. A single, publicly traded grid-construction giant, Quanta Services, has built almost all of that network for AEP. Now the two have a new strategic partnership, and they’ve been tapped to build many of the lines now in the works.

Likewise, just a handful of suppliers make the robust equipment that goes on a high-voltage grid, like transformers that step voltage down to usable levels. The Hyosung HICO factory in Memphis, Tenn., that I visited—the only factory in the country currently capable of making 765 kV transformers for these transmission lines—announced an equipment order last month for $541 million. HICO just announced $208 million in plant expansions that will nearly double its Memphis workforce to over 800. Even with those expansions, said HICO America head Jason Neal, “for the next two years we’re nearly fully booked.…We can’t fill all the demand.”

Hitachi Energy is a leader in high-voltage equipment of all kinds. It is spending over $1 billion to expand its U.S. manufacturing base. When I visited its high-voltage switchgear factory outside Pittsburgh in February, “Wild Thing” was playing loudly on the factory floor, where highly sought-after, specialized technicians build and send out a few thousand circuit breakers a year.

These are not the circuit breakers you’ll find on the electric panel in your house. The aluminum breaker has giant bushings coming out of it that look like drills or corkscrews. These are encased in silicone rings to prevent a scary discharge of voltage called a flashover that can get as hot as the surface of the sun and can cause equipment failure. Breaker components are also filled with a special gas that cools and interrupts electric currents and protects workers from electrocution.

A great deal of this equipment will soon head to Texas, where, as they say, everything’s bigger, including the future grid. AI developers and AEP have been quietly championing versions of a third 765 kV network some call the “Panhandle Plan” that AEP officially proposed to ERCOT just days ago. AEP did not reply to a request for comment.

Under the outlined $10 billion plan, AEP would turn a windy, sunny and largely open part of north Texas into an AI-studded electric beltway for multigigawatt data centers. The developer, Lancium, which is building power infrastructure for Oracle and Open AI's campus in Abilene, Texas, had been promoting a similar plan and has projects listed in AEP’s proposal. A consultant hired by Lancium found that at full scale, such a network could power an astounding 24 GW of data centers and still lower rates for everyday Texans as long as data centers paid their full share for building the high-efficiency system.

“If you build enough generation, enough wires, and interconnect them in the right way,” said Lancium CEO Michael McNamara on a panel last September, you could accommodate 6 GW in one place—“which is two Austins. That’s what we see coming and that’s what we’ve been building.”

There are more expansions coming of another type of very potent transmission: high-voltage direct current, which runs over much longer distances and could move power across several states. HVDC can be controversial because it doesn’t usually unload power in between destinations, making it a tough sell for the communities it crosses.

The scope and scale of all this sounds cutting-edge, but it pales in comparison to what China has already built: the world’s first ultrahigh-voltage transmission network, which goes all the way up to 1,100 kV and carries energy thousands of miles, versus hundreds in the U.S. We’d better hurry and catch up.

In other AI infrastructure news, Google has once again unveiled a creative deal to persuade a risk-averse power utility to connect promising clean-energy technologies to the grid. The utility is Xcel Energy in Minnesota, and Google’s plan creates a new rate structure called a clean energy accelerator charge. The goal is to bring on a large amount of long-duration battery storage from startup Form Energy, while protecting ratepayers from the extra costs this requires. The arrangement also includes a novel subsidy to distribute batteries to commercial and industrial sites where the grid needs capacity. The Information’s Steve Levine separately revealed that the deal represents $1 billion in revenue for Form.

The big tech companies are set to unveil a White House pact on Wednesday to prevent consumers from paying higher electricity costs because of data centers. The pact builds on promises they’d largely already made to pay their own way for AI infrastructure.

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