It's Tuesday. Nobody writes headlines about power conversion. Somebody just wrote a $4.4 billion check for it.
In today's edition:
⚡ Big Story: Flex buys EPC Power for $4.4B as data center racks hit 800 volts
🔌 Quick Hits: Megapack 3 in Texas, Europe's first SMR turbines, a solid-state transformer
💰 Capital Stack: PwC maps a $31.6 trillion buildout
📋 Policy Watch: ERCOT's audit and California's rate hikes
📊 Chart of the Day: cell prices down 97% since 2000
The Big Story
Flex buys EPC Power for $4.4 billion as racks hit 800 volts
Goldman Sachs Alternatives and Cleanhill Partners agreed to sell California power-electronics maker EPC Power to contract manufacturer Flex for $4.4 billion, announced September 3 and expected to close in Q4 2026. EPC Power builds software-defined inverters, power conversion systems and solid-state transformers, and Flex singled out the fit with 800V data center power architectures. The business lands in Flex's Cloud and Power Infrastructure segment, which Flex intends to spin out as a separate public company in Q1 2027.
"We first invested in EPC Power in 2021 because we believed power conversion would become a critical enabling technology as renewable generation, grid modernisation, and digital infrastructure converged."
Flex expects EPC Power to generate about $800 million of revenue in 2026, growing roughly 40% in 2027 at an EBITDA margin near 30%.
EPC Power opened its third US plant last month, adding 27 GW of nameplate capacity in South Carolina at a site it says can ramp to 40 GW.
EPC Power pitches the hardware at AI load volatility, which it says can swing demand by megawatts in a fraction of a second.
The deal follows an executive order banning imports of inverters, transformers and other bulk power equipment from 24 countries including China, making domestic manufacturing a competitive asset.
Source: Energy-Storage.news and Data Center Knowledge
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Quick Hits
Small bites from across the grid.
Five from across the stack, two of them reminders that the transformer is the part nobody can hurry.
Tesla started Megapack 3 production at its Texas megafactory, putting the redesigned grid-scale battery into volume manufacturing. Energy-Storage.news
Siemens Energy will build steam turbine components for Rolls-Royce SMR at Newcastle, the first European production of SMR turbines, for a three-unit project in Wales. World Nuclear News
Hyosung said it developed a 22.9kV-class solid-state transformer for the US AI data center market and that its US transformer and breaker production bases are complete. PR Newswire
LF Energy graduated Seapath, the RTE-originated platform that runs substation protection and automation as software on vendor-neutral servers, with Elia, Amprion, Avangrid, Enedis and Alliander evaluating. Enlit World
Waratah Super Battery is poised to reach full output for the first time in a year after a replacement transformer was energised, a reminder that transformer lead times gate storage revenue like interconnection queues. RenewEconomy
The Capital Stack
PwC maps a $31.6 trillion data center buildout through 2050.
PwC's first Global Data Centre Outlook projects $31.6 trillion of data center capex through 2050, a cycle it expects to be dominated increasingly by recurring GPU and server spend. It names transmission capacity, substation availability and transformer lead times as the constraints deciding whether projects break ground at all. On-site generation helps individual projects, PwC notes, but does not remove the need for grid expansion where whole markets are adding gigawatts.
Source: Data Center Frontier
Also in the capital stack:
Crusoe and Fluidstack led the week's biggest venture rounds with multibillion-dollar AI infrastructure raises. Crunchbase News
Octave.energy raised 10 million euros led by SPDG Growth to push its battery and energy-management offering into the Netherlands, France and Germany. EU-Startups
Policy Watch
ERCOT told Texas officials it will finish the governor-ordered audit of data center load and interconnection requests by December, the market's first hard read on how much of the large-load queue is real. Data Center Dynamics
Southern California ratepayers are absorbing August increases that Heatmap traces to utility reform and wildfire costs rather than fuel or demand, a reminder that grid hardening lands on bills. Heatmap News
India's Central Electricity Authority proposed mandatory co-located storage on new ground-mount solar and onshore wind, a change that would reset project economics, financing and dispatch across the pipeline. Mercom India
Chart of the Day:
Lithium-ion cell prices fell 97% while demand rose a thousandfold.
Average lithium-ion cell prices fell 97% between 2000 and 2025 while annual battery demand grew to almost 1,000 times its 2000 level, according to the IEA, which puts the market above $150 billion and China at 85% of cell production.
Source: IEA · September 7, 2026
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