IN Brief:
- ABB has agreed to acquire French silicon-carbide power-conversion specialist Advantics.
- Advantics combines converter hardware, firmware, and control software in modules reaching efficiencies of up to 99%.
- The acquisition targets data centres, industrial microgrids, generation, storage, and high-power EV charging.
ABB has agreed to acquire French power-conversion specialist Advantics, expanding its direct-current portfolio with silicon-carbide converter hardware, embedded firmware, and control software.
Based in Saint-Genis-Pouilly, Advantics develops modular conversion systems for data centres, industrial microgrids, power generation, energy storage, and electric-vehicle infrastructure. Its platforms combine wide-bandgap power devices with system control and are specified at conversion efficiencies of up to 99%.
Financial terms have not been disclosed, while completion is expected during the fourth quarter of 2026, subject to customary conditions. Once the transaction closes, Advantics’ engineering capability will sit alongside ABB’s electrical protection, distribution, control, and power-management businesses.
The acquisition gives ABB a converter platform for infrastructure in which batteries, photovoltaic generation, fuel cells, servers, and high-power charging equipment already operate internally on direct current. Although many facilities continue to distribute electricity principally as alternating current, repeated conversion between AC and DC introduces semiconductor losses, magnetic components, filtering, thermal load, and additional control stages.
Architectures built around a managed DC bus can remove some of those repeated conversions, especially where storage and renewable generation are connected alongside native DC loads. The trade-off is a more demanding protection problem, since voltage coordination, isolation monitoring, fault interruption, and safe maintenance must be designed around sources capable of delivering substantial current without the natural zero-crossing available in an AC waveform.
Silicon carbide supports that shift by enabling power stages to operate at higher voltages and switching frequencies with lower losses than conventional silicon in many applications. Higher switching frequency can reduce the size of transformers, inductors, and capacitors, while lower conduction and switching losses reduce the heat that must be removed from densely packaged converters.
Device selection alone does not establish system efficiency, however, because gate-drive behaviour, commutation-loop inductance, busbar geometry, magnetic losses, current sensing, cooling, and firmware all shape the finished converter. Advantics brings those layers together, giving ABB an engineered module rather than an isolated semiconductor topology.
The platform has already been developed around 1200V silicon-carbide MOSFETs and gate drivers for modular 100kW converters. Liquid-cooled building blocks can be combined for megawatt-class charging, storage, microgrid, and data-centre systems, allowing capacity to scale without relying on one very large conversion stage.
Data-centre power architecture is becoming a severe test of converter density. AI servers are increasing rack power and current flow while narrowing the tolerance for conversion losses, because nearly every lost watt becomes heat that the cooling system must remove. Higher-voltage DC distribution can reduce conductor current and copper requirements, but it raises the demands placed on connectors, insulation, switchgear, fault containment, and service procedures.
Microgrids introduce a different control burden, since solar arrays, batteries, generators, vehicle chargers, and industrial loads can change state quickly. Converters must regulate voltage, share power, limit fault current, and move between grid-connected and islanded operation without destabilising the local network, making firmware and supervisory control inseparable from the power stage.
ABB can combine the acquired conversion technology with protection and distribution equipment surrounding the DC bus. That breadth is useful where stored energy in capacitors, cables, and batteries can sustain a fault after a converter has stopped switching, requiring coordinated detection and interruption across several pieces of equipment.
Modularity also affects maintenance and resilience. Parallel converter blocks can permit staged capacity increases and isolate a failed module, although current sharing, thermal balance, control stability, and common-mode failure mechanisms must be managed across the complete installation. Standardising the module does not eliminate the system-level qualification needed for each voltage, cooling, and load configuration.
The transaction extends ABB’s role from supplying components around DC infrastructure towards providing the conversion, protection, control, and distribution layers as one system. As storage, electrification, and computing loads reshape power networks, the engineering boundary between a converter and the installation around it is becoming progressively harder to maintain.
