ABB has introduced HiPerGuard 34.5kV, a version of its medium-voltage uninterruptible power supply that connects an AI data center to the grid at 34.5 kilovolts without an intermediate voltage conversion stage. The company announced it at Data Center World Washington 2026 and says the system will be available to order in summer 2026.
Conventional designs step medium-voltage grid supply down to low voltage for the UPS, then back up again for distribution. Removing those stages is what the product is selling. ABB puts the system's efficiency at 98 percent and quantifies the payoff as roughly $880,000 per year for every one percent efficiency gain in a 100MW AI data center, a figure the company calculated itself rather than one an outside party verified.
"For the first time, with ABB technology, AI data centers can connect directly to the grid at 34.5kV, cutting conversion energy losses and reducing infrastructure complexity," said Sebastien Surply, Critical Power Leader for ABB's Smart Power Division. The operational detail behind that claim is the part a facilities team will care about: fewer conversion stages mean less copper cabling and fewer devices, and ABB states the footprint drops by 20 to 25 percent against conventional systems.
Capacity scales in parallel blocks up to 25MW, so a site can add UPS capacity in stages instead of replacing the whole power train. The converter design is plug-and-play, which ABB offers as its answer to a load profile that keeps changing underneath the building.
Beyond ride-through, the system is built as a microgrid node. It accepts gas turbines, renewable generation and grid supply together, and ABB's Power Exchanger technology handles battery management alongside grid-facing functions including peak shaving and frequency regulation. For an operator sitting behind a constrained interconnection, that second role matters as much as the first, because a UPS that can shave peaks changes what capacity the utility has to deliver.
Certification is where the announcement has independent corroboration. UL Solutions recognized HiPerGuard as the first product of its kind to achieve UL 9540, the energy storage systems standard, and the portfolio holds both IEC and UL certification, including UL 1741. The full HiPerGuard range covers 4.16kV to 34.5kV, so the new version sits at the top of ABB's own ladder rather than replacing what sits below it.
Installed base is the other check available to a buyer. ABB says HiPerGuard deployments are growing across North America, Europe and Asia-Pacific, and names Applied Digital's 400MW and 300MW AI data center campuses in North Dakota among them. Those are ABB's references rather than customer-supplied accounts, and a buyer evaluating the 34.5kV version specifically would want to know how much of that base is running at the new voltage rather than at the lower end of the range.
Surply's "first time" framing is ABB's own, and the announcement names no competing product it is measured against, so a buyer comparing against Vertiv, Schneider Electric or Eaton has to assemble that comparison elsewhere. Pricing is not disclosed. Neither is the lead time between order and commissioning, which for medium-voltage switchgear and converters is usually the number that decides a schedule.
For anyone designing a campus against a grid interconnection that is already the constraint, this is a change in where the conversion losses sit and how much electrical room the design needs. The evidence that would settle it is a third-party efficiency measurement at load and a published lead time, and neither exists yet.
Leave a Reply