Dedicated substation

A dedicated substation is an electrical substation built and reserved for a single data center campus, stepping down transmission-voltage power (typically 66-500 kV) from the grid to the medium-voltage level a facility's switchgear can distribute, rather than sharing capacity with other industrial or residential customers. Hyperscale and AI campuses increasingly requisition dedicated substations because shared substations cannot guarantee the redundancy, headroom or interconnection timeline a gigawatt-scale campus needs; utilities in markets from Texas to the UAE have reported multi-year queues for new dedicated-substation projects tied to data center demand. Costs range from tens of millions of dollars for a several-hundred-MW substation to well over a hundred million for gigawatt-class sites, and the substation is often the longest lead-time item on a project's critical path, in some cases taking longer to deliver than the data center building itself.