Doug’s Dime: What’s Next For Data Centers?

The data center industry is awaiting the commercialization of solid-state transformer technology, which skips power conversion steps and limits energy loss. The tech is already in use in electric vehicle charging and is about a year away from commercialization for data centers, where the voltages in question are much higher and the demand variances are swingier. According to Jeffries, the U.S. market for solid-state transformers will be about $4.3 billion per year by 2030 and would eliminate $1.39 million in costs per megawatt for data centers, which adds up for data centers that may be over 1,000 megawatts. Though many existing data centers are under construction already without the tech, the companies working on solid-state transformers believe that given that savings — and the chance to free up space for more processing — they’ll be able to plug in nicely into existing builds. Emily Forgash, Michelle Ma and Mark Chediak, Bloomberg