Power Integrations joins work with Nvidia on power supply push 

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By Stephen Nellis

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) -Power Integrations, a niche chipmaker that provides chips for handling power, on Monday said it is working with Nvidia on the artificial intelligence giant’s push to make data centers operate at higher voltages.

Nvidia earlier this year unveiled an effort with more than a dozen partner companies to convert massive AI data centers – which can consume as much electricity as cities – to distribute internal power using 800 volts of direct current, rather than the more common alternating current. The effort is meant to reduce the losses that come from moving power around inside the data center.

Power Integrations, which had $419 million in revenue in its most recent fiscal year and which supplies chips that handle power for cars and major appliances such as clothing dryers, makes chips out of a material called gallium nitride, known in the industry as “GaN.”

Those chips can handle the power delivery requirements of chips such as Nvidia’s while taking up less space than chips made of other materials.

Power Integrations did not give a revenue estimate or precise timeline on when its chips would be supplied to Nvidia.

But Roland Saint-Pierre, vice president of product development at Power Integrations, told Reuters in an interview that the reliability testing that comes with supplying the automotive industry helped it gain a spot on Nvidia’s approved supplier list. That list already features several of its competitors from Europe and China such as Infineon and InnoScience. 

“The fact that we are automotive qualified, and we have these power GaN devices running in automobiles, was eye opening for them,” Saint-Pierre said. “This is something they like because of the rigor and the reliability concerns for these data centers.”

(Reporting by Stephen Nellis in San Francisco Editing by Tomasz Janowski)