Infineon and SolarEdge bring solid-state protection to 800 VDC AI data centers

What it means for hiring

Eight hundred volts DC across a data centre hall means the mechanical circuit breaker has run out of road. At that voltage a DC arc does not extinguish on its own, and clearing a fault fast enough to save power-dense racks is a semiconductor problem, not a contactor problem. The detail worth noticing is who Infineon chose to do it with: SolarEdge is a solar inverter company, and the string inverter world has been protecting DC at these voltages, in the field, unattended, for fifteen years.

That is the whole recruiting argument. Data centre power teams still hire out of UPS and switchgear, where the instinct is AC and the protection is mechanical, and they are then surprised that nobody on the shortlist has designed a solid-state breaker. The people who have done this work sit in photovoltaic inverters and EV powertrain, and they are used to arguing about di/dt, snubbers and creepage at 800 volts because their product does not ship otherwise. Anyone building high-voltage DC distribution for AI halls should be looking at solar and automotive CVs, and should expect to explain why a data centre is the more interesting job.

Read the original at eeNews Europe .