In order to meet the demand of power supply, the construction of transmission line projects is constantly advancing, and the level of cost control is constantly improving, which puts forward higher requirements for the accuracy of cost prediction. This paper proposes an intelligent cost prediction model based on least squares support vector machine (LSSVM) optimized by particle swarm optimization (PSO). Originally extracting natural, technological, and economic indexes from the perspective of cost composition, principal component analysis (PCA) is used to reduce the dimension of indexes. And PSO is innovatively introduced to optimize the parameters of LSSVM model to obtain the optimal parameters. The obtained principal component data are imported into empirical parameter LSSVM prediction model and the optimized parameter PSO-LSSVM prediction model, respectively, for modeling and prediction, and then comparing the prediction results to analyze the effect of model optimization. The results show that the absolute deviation of the optimized parameter prediction model is less than 9%. And the prediction accuracy of the optimized parameter prediction model is better than that of the empirical parameter model, which can provide a reliable basis for investment decision-making of transmission line projects.