Infineon advances leading-edge 800 Volt AI data centre power architecture
Infineon supports the 800 Volt direct current (VDC) power architecture announced by NVIDIA at Computex 2025 for AI infrastructure. The exponential growth of artificial intelligence is rapidly outstripping the capacity of the current 54 V data centre power infrastructure. A shift to a centralised 800 VDC architecture allows for reduced power losses, higher efficiency and reliability. However, the new architecture requires new power conversion solutions and safety mechanisms to prevent potential hazards and costly server downtimes e.g. due to service and maintenance.
AI data centre operators are investing heavily in high-performance computing for artificial intelligence, with projects like Stargate requiring massive capital expenditure (CAPEX) of billions of dollars. To guarantee a strong return on invest, it is crucial to maximize the uptime of AI server racks, which mandates a modular and scalable scheme for serviceability. Infineon and NVIDIA are collaborating on safety and service aspects such as the hot-swap controller functionality, which enables future server boards to operate in 800 VDC power architectures. Exchanging server boards on an 800 VDC bus while the entire rack continues operating requires a controlled pre-charging and dis-charging of the board. Infineon is supporting this with a dedicated solution based on the advanced semiconductor material silicon carbide (SiC). Enabled by the CoolSiC™ JFET technology data centre operators can exchange server boards in an 800 VDC architecture while other servers continue to operate in the same rack. This mitigates the risk of downtimes and enables safe maintenance of server racks.
The switch to an 800 Volt direct current architecture is a major step forward to establishing powerful AI gigafactories of the future. The power consumption of an AI server rack is estimated to increase from around 120 kilowatts to 500 kilowatts – and to 1 megawatt by the end of the decade. As already announced in May 2025, Infineon will collaborate with NVIDIA on developing advanced power conversion solutions for accelerated computing platforms powered by 800 VDC. Infineon is leveraging its Intermediate Bus Converter (IBC) technology and high-frequency switching solutions based on gallium nitride (GaN) to accelerate the development of three- and two-stage conversion solutions from grid to core. Both approaches aim to provide the most suitable solution for data centre operators reaching efficiency levels as high as 98 percent per conversion stage.
As the cost of an AI server is as much as 30 times higher than a traditional server, reducing power losses and ensuring high service uptime are key levers to reducing total cost of ownership and minimising the carbon footprint of AI data centre. Therefore, Infineon is providing full systems solutions including hot-swap controllers, reliable protection technology and highly efficient power conversion solutions based on all relevant semiconductor materials to enable efficient, safe, and sustainable operation of megawatt-scale AI server racks.
