Hyperscale Power raises €5M for smaller transformer
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- Hyperscale Power raised a €5 million seed round led by World Fund and Vsquared Ventures to build a solid-state transformer prototype it says will be smaller than any competitor's system.
- Solid-state transformer startups have collectively raised over $330 million, with rivals including Amperesand (incubated by Temasek), DG Matrix (backed by ABB), and Heron Power (founded by former Tesla executive Drew Baglino, backed by Andreessen Horowitz).
- Hyperscale differentiates by stepping power up to the tens of kilohertz range — higher frequencies than competitors — before converting it to the required voltage, according to CEO Daniel Rothmund.
- Rothmund completed his PhD at ETH Zürich by designing a 99.1% efficient solid-state transformer, grounding the startup's technical claims.
- The bottleneck is quantified: Nvidia's latest server racks consume more than 100 kilowatts, with 1 megawatt racks on the roadmap — at those scales, conventional transformers and rectifiers would be "more than twice as large as the server racks itself," Rothmund said.
- Rothmund warned that without solid-state transformers ready soon, "it will actually slow down the progress in scaling up data centers."
Why it matters: Nvidia's coming 1 MW racks would need conventional transformers more than twice the size of the racks themselves — a concrete bottleneck that Hyperscale and $330M+ in competing funding are racing to eliminate. If solid-state transformers arrive on schedule, AI data center scaling unblocks; if not, Rothmund warns the slowdown is real, not hypothetical.
