Vantage Data Centers has reserved more than 1 GW of manufacturing capacity for Heron Link, the solid-state transformer made by Heron Power Electronics, for its hyperscale campuses. The two companies announced the agreement on 21 October. Heron Link takes medium-voltage power from the grid and delivers 800 V DC to the racks, with energy storage built into the unit.
One Box In Place Of A Line Of Equipment
In a conventional AI hall the power passes through a chain: medium-voltage switchgear, an iron-core transformer down to 480 V AC, a UPS with its batteries, distribution boards and finally the rack power supplies that turn AC into DC. Every step costs some efficiency, floor space and installation time. Heron's idea is to cut most of that out. The company targets an efficiency above 98.5% from medium voltage to 800 V DC and says the design needs less equipment, space, material and labour than a 480 V AC layout.
More details came with Heron's funding round in February. TechCrunch reported then that each unit is rated at 5 MW and carries lithium-ion batteries for about 30 seconds of supply, enough to bridge the switch to backup power, so that a data center could do without a UPS. Heron raised $140 million in that round, led by Andreessen Horowitz's American Dynamism fund and Breakthrough Energy Ventures, and plans a factory for 40 GW of transformers a year, with pilot production in early 2027. The founder, Drew Baglino, led powertrain and energy engineering at Tesla.
The new announcement does not say when or where the first units go into Vantage buildings. Heron is part of Nvidia's 800 V DC MGX ecosystem; Vantage says its customers want a faster and more efficient way to deploy power-dense AI capacity.
Thirty Seconds Before The Engines Take Over
For whoever is responsible for backup power, the ride-through is the number to read twice. Half a minute of battery leaves the generating sets little slack: they have to start, come up to speed and accept load inside that window, every time, including on a cold morning after weeks on standby. Without a UPS more of the burden sits on the sets and their auxiliaries - starting batteries, fuel, jacket water heating and cooling - than in a hall with minutes of battery autonomy.
Then there is the load itself. Heron says the built-in storage buffers the fast swings of AI training loads. Whether it also smooths what a generator sees during an outage, and how solid-state units behave when they are fed by engines rather than a stiff grid, are questions for both suppliers before the electrical design of a data center is frozen.
A gigawatt reserved from a factory that is not yet in series production is a bet on its schedule. If pilot production starts in 2027 as planned, Vantage will be among the first to see how the concept holds up at scale.
Sources: Vantage and Heron Power (Business Wire), The Fast Mode, TechCrunch
