The transformer, a passive box of copper and iron, is being redesigned for the AI era. Amperesand, a Singapore-based startup founded in 2023, builds solid-state transformers that convert medium-voltage grid power, between 13.8 kV and 35 kV, directly to 800-volt DC in a single step, using silicon carbide power electronics instead of magnetic coils. Chief executive Brian Dow, a former Tesla executive, told EE Times the devices can control how fast a data center’s load changes, and, paired with a battery, keep an AI load running through a grid fault instead of dropping it.
The failure mode it targets is real and recent. Dow cited a July 2026 incident in Virginia in which data centers disconnected from the grid and switched to generators, dropping more than 3 gigawatts of load in seconds and flickering power across the eastern United States. AI training loads swing violently by design; grids built for steady industrial demand handle that badly. Amperesand’s product is modular, built from stackable power stage modules assembled and tested at its Reno, Nevada facility, and it targets 98.5 percent efficiency at full power.
Commercially, the company says a major hyperscaler is among its first customers and that a large electrical equipment maker, one of the established ABB, Eaton, Schneider or Siemens class of suppliers, has taken a minority stake and partnered with it, though Dow named neither. The category got its catalyst last year when Nvidia, Google and Microsoft backed an open 800-volt DC architecture for next-generation racks. Amperesand is also evaluating solar, storage and port electrification uses. The claims here rest on one specialist report and the company’s own account, so the deployment evidence, named customers and field efficiency, is what to watch next.