According to IDTechEx forecasts in the market report “Power Electronics Market 2026-2036: Data Centers, Electric Vehicles, and Renewables”, the power electronics market for data centres is expected to grow 2.5-fold by 2036.
IDTechEx analysts are reporting that the electric vehicle industry has, for the past decade, become the dominant application area for power electronics. Most power electronics players have enjoyed the automotive industry as their main source of revenue for years, and power electronics innovations have focused mainly on improving efficiency and performance across the e-powertrain. However, throughout the past two years, power electronics tier 1s have gradually seen their automotive industry revenue stagnate amid reduced government incentives and increasingly steep competition with highly 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 centers, represent a growing and rapidly innovating market, with an increased uptake of wide bandgap semiconductors SiC and GaN to support increasingly powerful and power-hungry AI training models.
Now, data centre power architecture in the form of HVDC (800VDC) data centres is being migrated over to data centres to 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.
IDTechEx researchers state that there are 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 electric vehicles.
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 Si 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.
AI data centre per-rack power requirements are expected to increase over the next five years. To facilitate these changes, key EV power electronics innovations are being brought over the data centre industry
800V EV architecture, facilitated by WBGs, enables a step-change in powertrain efficiency
Thanks to technological innovations and commercialization across the wide bandgap semiconductor market, largely driven by electric vehicles, the adoption of wide bandgap technology into data center power electronics has been accelerated. 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 electric vehicles. 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. With a precedent of 800V architecture, and development of the necessary safety evaluation and processes which can be modified from EV to data centre, HVDC data centre architecture development can be accelerated by taking notes from existing EV power architectures. 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.
