ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE From road to rack:
IDTechEx reports on how 800V EV innovations are redefi ning AI data centre power architecture
By Matthew Fall, Technology Analyst, IDTechEx T
he 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 effi ciency 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 centres, 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. 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. 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 infl uenced by 800V EV power electronics, from the materials used to high- voltage safety and protection mechanisms. In “Power Electronics Market 2026-2036: Data Centers, Electric Vehicles, 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 are at a bottleneck and are turning to EV power electronics for inspiration
In November 2022, ChatGPT brought artifi cial
intelligence from science fi ction into the real world. Since then, 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 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 effi ciency 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.
In “Power Electronics Market 2026-2036: Data Centers, Electric Vehicles, and Renewables”, IDTechEx tracks 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. AI data centre per-rack power requirements are expected to increase over the next fi ve years. To facilitate these changes, key EV power electronics innovations are being brought over the data centre industry. Source: IDTechEx
800V EV architecture, facilitated by WBGs, enables a step-change in powertrain effi ciency. 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
24 JULY/AUGUST 2026 | ELECTRONICS FOR ENGINEERS
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