---
title: US Data Centers Are Buying Engine Power Plants Instead of Waiting for the Grid
description: HD Hyundai's largest ever engine order, $673.8 million for 1,000 megawatts, will power US data centers as operators pay for their own generation.
author: Darie Nani (Editor-in-Chief)
updated: 2026-08-10T11:19:28.108Z
canonical: https://www.sovereignmagazine.com/article/us-data-centers-engine-power-plants-hd-hyundai
categories: Business
content_type: Analysis
region: United States
publication: Sovereign Magazine
schema_type: Article
---

A US energy developer is paying HD Hyundai Heavy Industries $673.8 million for a thousand megawatts of gas engines to power data centers. HD Hyundai said on 9 August that it is the largest order for power generation engines the company has taken.

The buyer, Corban Energy Group, supplies gas, LNG and power products to infrastructure projects including data centers and Department of War work. Its president is Daniel Chung. HD Hyundai will supply generating systems assembled from its 9.6 megawatt HiMSEN engines, which it says have the output and efficiency to run continuously at all hours. The electricity will go to data centers operated by what HD Hyundai describes only as a major US technology company.

## The Engines Come Off a Power Plant Line, Not a Shipyard

HD Hyundai Heavy Industries is a shipbuilding affiliate and HiMSEN is its own engine brand, but the range going to Corban is a stationary one. The group's engine company markets HiMSEN dual fuel units as [engine power plants](https://www.hyundai-engine.com/en/products/stationarydualfuel), sized from a single machine up to stations of a few hundred megawatts. In Colombia it delivered a 93 megawatt plant of ten HiMSEN generator sets to Termonorte in November 2018, running on natural gas, diesel or heavy fuel oil as base load. What is new is the customer.

## Operators Are Paying for New Generation Themselves

Contracting dedicated generation has become an ordinary part of a large data center project. Meta is expanding its Richland Parish site in Louisiana to 5 gigawatts of compute capacity, an investment it puts at more than $50 billion, and says its [agreement with Entergy](https://about.fb.com/news/2026/07/teachers-local-businesses-win-as-meta-expands-louisiana-data-center/) will fund seven new natural gas fueled generating plants, three grid scale batteries, nuclear uprates and other purchased power. Constellation Energy signed a 20 year contract to supply Microsoft data centers in the mid-Atlantic from a Three Mile Island reactor that had been shut since 2019, when its operator said it was no longer profitable. Amazon Web Services took 960 megawatts from Talen Energy's Susquehanna nuclear plant, in 120 megawatt increments and with an option to stop at 480.

The Energy Information Administration puts the pull down to load shape. A data center's demand does not rise and fall through the day the way a household's does, so an operator wants the same power at three in the morning as at noon, and a named plant delivers that more predictably than a place in a shared queue.

## Demand Is Growing Fastest Where the Data Centers Already Are

The EIA expects US retail electricity sales to grow 2.2 percent a year in 2025 and 2026, against an average of 0.8 percent over the previous four years, with Texas the outlier at around 11 percent a year. In Virginia, commercial electricity sales rose by nearly 30 million megawatt hours between 2019 and 2025, faster than any state except Texas, and PJM expects its Dominion zone, which serves the largest concentration of data centers in the world, to add more summer peak demand in absolute terms than any other zone it runs between now and 2030. Texas has meanwhile [paused new data center grid connections](https://www.sovereignmagazine.com/article/texas-data-center-interconnection-pause-audit) until regulators audit every project in the queue, and one of the disclosures it now wants is whether a developer intends to generate its own power on site.

HD Hyundai says it is expanding across the group to chase the same demand. HD Korea Shipbuilding and Offshore Engineering is working on core technologies for floating data centers, HD Hyundai Electric is expanding in power distribution and electrical equipment, and HD Hyundai Marine Solution services power generation engines once they are running. In April the group signed a $425 million agreement with another American developer, AEG, also for data center power equipment. It cites a projection from the Electric Power Research Institute that data centers' share of total US electricity consumption will more than triple by 2030.

## FAQ

**Q: What is a HiMSEN engine?**
HiMSEN is HD Hyundai's own line of medium speed reciprocating engines. The dual fuel range is sold as stationary generating plant as well as for ships, in models rated between 5,760 and 9,600 kilowatts in the middle of the range. The units in the Corban contract are the 9.6 megawatt size.

**Q: How much generating capacity is 1,000 megawatts in this context?**
The plant HD Hyundai delivered to Termonorte in Colombia in 2018, ten HiMSEN generator sets running as base load, came to 93 megawatts in total. The Corban order is more than ten times that, assembled from 9.6 megawatt units.

**Q: Why are data center operators contracting their own generation?**
The US Energy Information Administration points to the load shape. A data center's demand does not rise and fall through the day the way a household's does, so operators want the same supply at every hour, and they have been signing for the output of specific plants to get it. Demand is also growing fastest in the places where data centers already cluster, which is where connection queues are longest.