Power is converted four or five times between the substation and the processor
1 / 8
A campus takes in medium-voltage alternating current, usually 10 to 35 kV, and a GPU needs under a volt. Every architecture here is a decision about which voltage to carry across that distance, because each voltage you pick buys a converter at both ends of the run.
Almost all of the record was written in 2026, and what it records is scarcity
2 / 8
Of 237 news items behind this page, 188 were written in 2026, 41 in 2025 and eight in 2024, and nothing earlier. Read as a single year, the pattern is consistent across suppliers: orders arriving faster than shipments, backlogs growing, lead times extending, and acquirers paying for capacity rather than for technology.
Strategy
The patent record is Chinese and the research record is American
3 / 8
Nearly every patent published in this field is a Chinese filing. Of 1,298 patent publications, 1,072 are Chinese, 101 American, 32 international applications and 24 European. The papers invert that: 46 American, 15 Chinese, and 40 with no country recorded.
Research
The plant settled on 800 volts of direct current after a five-year climb
4 / 8
Baidu filed two designs in 2021, arguing about voltages above 240 V and above 400 V, and converting high-voltage AC down to a low-voltage DC distribution stage. Chinese practice settled at 240 V and 336 V.
Market
A customer's specification now does the work a safety standard would do
5 / 8
In March 2026 Nvidia, Google and Microsoft published an 800 VDC architecture and a low-voltage DC transformer specification through the Open Compute Project, with more than 80 equipment manufacturers building to it. The roadmap stages product: an MGX-compatible power rack in late 2026, a row power centre up to 2 MW per row in 2027, and facility DC blocks for new builds after that.
Strategy
The operators filed first and the equipment vendors are filing now
6 / 8
The most visible change in five years is who files. The filing rate itself has barely moved: 197 publications in 2021, 213 in 2022, 191 in 2023, 189 in 2024, 220 in 2025.
Research
The transformer stopped being iron and became a switching stage
7 / 8
This is the mechanism that makes the rest possible. A conventional distribution transformer passes power through an iron core at the grid's frequency, so its ratio is fixed and there is nowhere to attach a battery. A solid-state transformer chops the power at high frequency instead, so isolation and voltage regulation collapse into one stage and a DC port appears on the low-voltage side.
Market
One site runs the whole chain and has published no measurement of it
8 / 8
Envision's Galaxy campus at Ulanqab takes 10 kV AC through solid-state transformers onto an 800 V DC bus, buffers it with batteries under its Dubhe controller, and has powered live computing load since August 2026. The site is planned for 3 GW and a million accelerators, with a 5 GW target for 2030.