Vantage Books 1GW of Heron Solid-State Transformers

Data centre operator Vantage has placed a gigawatt-scale bet on a different way of getting grid power into AI racks. It has secured more than a gigawatt of manufacturing capacity for Heron Link, a solid-state transformer made by Heron Power, to install across its hyperscale campuses.

The joint announcement on 21 October is about plumbing rather than chips, but the plumbing is becoming a bottleneck. As racks move towards megawatt-class power draw, the companies say, operators face shortages of power, electrical equipment and time. Neither company disclosed a price, which Vantage sites will get the units, or when deliveries begin.

One box in place of several conversion steps

Traditional data centre electrical systems, the release says, rely on multiple stages of conversion, energy storage and distribution between the grid and the rack, and need more equipment, cabling, floor space and labour as rack densities rise. The companies compare their approach with the conventional 480-volt AC architecture.

Heron Link, according to the release, converts medium-voltage grid power “directly to 800 VDC with integrated energy storage”. Fewer conversion stages should mean less energy lost as heat, less equipment, less floor space and less installation work, the companies say. Heron “targets more than 98.5% efficiency from medium voltage to 800 VDC”. That is a target, not a figure measured in Vantage’s buildings. The built-in storage is meant to buffer fluctuating AI loads, which the companies say would let data centres act as more flexible partners to the grid.

Heron describes itself as a participant in NVIDIA’s 800 VDC MGX ecosystem. NVIDIA’s factory-built DSX POD containers, set out this week, also take a standard 800-volt direct-current power input.

“By partnering with Vantage to deploy more than a gigawatt of Heron Links in data centers, we will move 800 VDC from a reference architecture concept to a repeatable, deployed platform,” said Drew Baglino, Heron’s founder and chief executive. Curtis Aubry, Vantage’s vice president of global product strategy, said simplifying the electrical design would “accelerate our customers’ speed to capacity”.

A two-year-old supplier with a factory still to build

Heron is young. Baglino, a former senior Tesla executive, founded it in 2024, and it is based in Scotts Valley, California, DCD reported. DCD says it raised $140m in a Series B round earlier this year, taking total funding to $183m.

The capacity Vantage has booked depends on a factory that is not yet running. In August, Heron chose Morgan Hill, California, south of San Jose, for its first large plant, a converted 286,000 sq ft warehouse. It said the site is designed to make up to 10,000 Heron Links a year, which DCD puts at 40GW, and that mass production is “slated to begin in late 2027”. Heron said it would invest more than $100m in the plant and add more than 600 jobs. On those figures, Vantage’s gigawatt is a small share of planned output, but a large customer for a manufacturer still building its line.

Vantage runs campuses across North America, EMEA and Asia Pacific, but the release does not say whether any European site is in line for the new equipment. The next details to watch for are the first named campus, a delivery date and evidence that the 98.5% target holds up in a working hall.