Surging AI workloads are forcing a fundamental rethink of rack-level power. As traditional designs give way to open compute power shelves and high-voltage DC architectures, the challenge is no longer just delivering more power, but doing so safely, flexibly and at scale. Calvin Nicholson, Senior Director of Product Management at Legrand, explains how infrastructure strategies are evolving to meet the demands of next-generation, high-performance environments.

What fundamental shifts are you seeing in rack-level power architecture and how are operators adapting their distribution, monitoring and resilience strategies?

I’ ve been in the data centre space for many years and I’ ve never seen this much change.

There has been a lot of changes recently with densities rising sharply and we’ re seeing this effect multiple parts of our business. Typical power distribution within the cabinet is 60 A / 400 V, but now we’ re seeing a fundamental shift to 125 A internationally.

To combat this radical change, we’ re targeting multiple PDUs in the cabinet to meet the higher workloads, as well as increased adoption of open compute solutions, where multiple power shelves can be stacked to achieve higher densities. Although there is a higher cost with such changes, many operators are integrating open compute type solutions.

As AI workloads push traditional rack designs to their limits, how is the shift towards open compute standards redefining how data centres balance extreme power density with operational flexibility?

Open compute has been around for a long time and the advantages speak for themselves. The ORv3 design eliminates the need for lots of cables and benefits include flexibility and higher efficiency on power supplies. With the GB200 / 300 processors driving huge demand, adding multiple power shelves to reach 150 kW densities is how traditional rack designs are transforming.

When you reach high densities, an increased number of power shelves are required which means total rack power consumption rises significantly. This is driving a shift to high-voltage DC, which is still yet to be fully understood and perfected. In North America, Meta, Google and Microsoft all operate at plus or minus 400 V DC, whereas NVIDIA operates at 0-800 V DC. While there has been a shift to open compute, the high-voltage DC is part of the whole evolution.

How are teams evaluating AC versus DC distribution and how are they positioning their infrastructure to support future high-voltage deployments?

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