800 VDC — NVIDIA 800 VDC architecture

01 — Today

Stepped down, again and again

Utility power arrives as medium-voltage AC. It is transformed to 415 V, reconditioned by a UPS, spread through PDUs and busways, turned into 54 V DC by power supplies inside the rack, then converted once more on every compute tray. Every handoff turns some of it into heat.

• < 90%End-to-end efficiency, grid to GPUNVIDIA · Oct 2025

Height is voltage, on a log scale. Thickness is current. Cyan is AC, lime is 800 V DC, copper is low-voltage DC.

02 — 800 VDC

Convert once, at the edge

Solid-state transformers and industrial rectifiers at the perimeter turn 13.8 kV AC straight into 800 V DC and send it down the hall. The AC power supplies leave the rack, and their fans leave the power chain.

• Up to 5%Better end-to-end efficiencyNVIDIA · May 2025
• Up to 70%Lower maintenance costNVIDIA · May 2025

03 — Current

P = V × I

At one megawatt, 54 V means 18,519 amps. At 800 V it is 1,250: about 15 times less current, and in the same conductor about 1/219 of the resistive loss.

• 200 kgCopper busbar in one 1 MW rack at 54 VNVIDIA · May 2025
• 45%Less copper than 415 V AC distributionNVIDIA · May 2025
• 1/219I²R loss in the same conductor, (54 / 800)²Worked out here

04 — Swing

Idle to flat out in milliseconds

Thousands of GPUs start and stop in step. A rack can swing from about 30% to 100% of its power and back within milliseconds. The grid should not feel it, so storage sits in between, on two timescales.

• ms – sCapacitors · supercapacitorsNVIDIA · Oct 2025
• s – minFacility battery storageNVIDIA · Oct 2025

Illustrative trace. The swing from about 30% to 100% is NVIDIA's figure; the rhythm is not.

• Capacitors · supercapacitors: Milliseconds to seconds
• Facility battery storage: Seconds to minutes

05 — Rack

576 GPUs, one feed

800 V enters the rack on two conductors and a protective earth. On each compute tray a 64:1 LLC converter takes it straight to 12 V, in 26% less area than a multi-stage converter. Kyber, the rack designed around it, holds 576 Rubin Ultra GPUs.

• 1 MWPer rack, from 2027NVIDIA · May 2025
• 64:1800 V to 12 V in one stepNVIDIA · Oct 2025
• 576Rubin Ultra GPUs in one Kyber rackNVIDIA · May 2025

06 — Rack, row, building

Then the row, then the building

The same 800 V backbone carries racks from 100 kW to beyond a megawatt without being rebuilt, and it is being standardized in the open, through the Open Compute Project.

• 80+Manufacturers building to the specificationNVIDIA · Aug 2026