Enphase Energy expands US manufacturing for AI data center infrastructure

Enphase Energy, the company best known for slapping microinverters on rooftop solar panels, is making a sharp pivot into one of the most electricity-hungry industries on the planet: AI data centers. The NASDAQ-listed firm announced the development of its IQ Solid-State Transformer (IQ SST) platform, a distributed power conversion system designed specifically for the dense, always-on computing environments that large language models and AI workloads demand. And it plans to build the whole thing on American soil, leveraging manufacturing lines that have already churned out roughly 87.8 million microinverters. What Enphase is actually building Enphase’s answer is the IQ SST, a modular building block that starts at 1.25 MW and scales to 2.5 MW. Each unit integrates 342 power modules built on advanced gallium nitride (GaN) technology and Enphase’s proprietary Kestrel ASIC chip. The specs are genuinely impressive. Peak efficiency hits 98.5%, meaning only 1.5% of electricity gets lost in the conversion process. Targeted availability sits at 99.999%, the so-called “five nines” standard that translates to roughly five minutes of downtime per year. CEO Badri Kothandaraman has positioned the ...