From road to rack: IDTechEx reports on 800V innovations
For the past decade, the EV industry has dominated power electronics. However, throughout the past two years, tier 1 power electronics companies have seen their automotive industry revenue stagnate amid reduced government incentives and steep competition with vertically integrated Chinese EV manufacturers.
While IDTechEx still forecasts long-term growth in the EV market, many players are looking for alternative, growing application areas for power electronics. Data centres, and especially AI data centres, represent such an opportunity, with an increased uptake of wide bandgap semiconductors SiC and GaN to support increasingly powerful and power-hungry AI training models.
According to IDTechEx forecasts in the report 'Power Electronics Market 2026-2036: Data centres, EVs, and Renewables', the power electronics market for data centres is expected to grow 2.5-fold by 2036.
A paradigm shift in data centre power architecture is coming over the next few years in the form of HVDC (800VDC) data centres, which will unlock an order-of-magnitude increase in rack power. This overhaul in data centre power architecture is directly influenced by 800V EV power electronics, from the materials used to high-voltage safety and protection mechanisms.
In 'Power Electronics Market 2026-2036: Data centres, EVs, and Renewables', IDTechEx tracks innovations across EV and data centre power electronics, drawing deep, cross-application conclusions between EV and data centre power electronics.
AI data centres turn to EV power electronics for inspiration
Since the launch of ChatGPT in 2022, AI has become increasingly mainstream, and leading AI software players, especially across the USA and China, have invested US$ billions of capital into the development of more complex and powerful AI models.
The GPU industry has evolved rapidly to accommodate more advanced training models. Each new generation of server requires more power to be delivered, and incumbent data centre rack architecture is simply not able to support the next generation of Nvidia’s 'Vera Rubin Ultra' servers.
Rack power levels have exploded from around 20kW pre-ChatGPT to 100kW today, with rack power expected to reach over 1MW by the end of the decade. With incumbent silicon power electronics and 480/54V data centre architecture, a 1MW rack would require the whole rack space to be dedicated to power conversion and would need over 200kg of copper. Data centre efficiency was and still is a key consideration in data centre design. Data centre power density, the amount of power processed per unit volume, will become an increasingly critical metric for AI data centre design.
IDTechEx gas tracked two key developments in data centres that will facilitate this change: wide bandgap semiconductor adoption, and 800VDC data centre architecture. Both of these have been directly enabled by technological innovations in EVs.
800V EV architecture began to commercialise in 2019 with the Porsche Taycan, and has steadily been adopted across performance and, increasingly, across budget models. The two main drivers for the adoption of an 800V platform relate to increased charging speed and reduced cabling weight and I2R losses, improving overall EV efficiency.
The move to 800V has been underpinned by improvements and commercialisation of wide bandgap (WBG) semiconductors, SiC in particular. At 800V, the efficiency improvements of SiC upon incumbent Si IGBT and Si MOSFET technology are significant and outweigh the cost premium of SiC power semiconductors.
With EVs occupying the majority revenue share of the power electronics market, power electronics innovation revolved around EVs and the e-powertrain, for both SiC and GaN technology. This has led to considerable commercialisation and cost reduction for both wide bandgap materials, as well as demonstration of their long-term reliability in harsh environments and their material superiority to silicon for high-voltage applications.
GaN innovations have been significant due to hype around its potential future adoption into EVs. However, GaN uptake into EVs has been slow, with the material more suited to low-voltage, high-frequency applications.
Now, the adoption of wide bandgap technology into data centre power electronics is accelerating. Reference designs for 8kW and 12kW power supply units (PSUs) across leading power electronics players, such as Infineon and Navitas, feature SiC for high-voltage conversion stages and power factor correction (PFC), and GaN for low-voltage conversion stages.
With lower voltage conversion and the possibility for much faster (up to MHz) switching, the material benefits of GaN in data centres are highly desirable; GaN will likely enjoy faster uptake in data centres than in EVs. Switching to WBG semiconductors in data centres leads to efficiency gains, but importantly also leads to significant increases in power density, with smaller SiC and GaN devices, and reduction in the size of passive components, such as capacitors and inductors.
In the same way that WBG semiconductors enabled the 800V shift in EV architecture, they will also facilitate the transition to 800VDC/HVDC AI data centres, concludes IDTechEx.
The transition to 800VDC is expected to simplify and future-proof data centre architectures. With fewer power conversion stages and lower I2R losses, data centre efficiency will increase. Fewer points of failure reduce the chances of downtime. Most importantly, 800VDC data centre architecture enables much higher power levels to be delivered to server racks, supporting future GPU generations and AI training models.
