I. Core Driving Force: High Power Consumption Forces SiC Substitution and Upgrade
The explosion of AI large models has caused the power consumption of a single rack to surge from 10kW to 100kW or even higher. To deliver such massive amounts of energy, the power supply network in data centers must transition from low voltage to high voltage. Under such high-voltage operating conditions, traditional silicon (Si)-based materials are approaching their physical limits, making the introduction of silicon carbide (SiC) a mandatory choice.
Traditional silicon chips waste a large amount of electrical energy and generate tremendous waste heat when handling high voltage and high current. SiC materials are inherently resistant to high voltage and feature fast thermal conductivity, which can minimize unnecessary losses during power conversion, making it the optimal solution for addressing power loss and heat dissipation in high-voltage sections. It is primarily used in the "first power conversion port" where the external grid enters the computer room, large uninterruptible power supplies (UPS) that ensure computing power never goes offline, and future transformer systems that directly connect to the peripheral grid.
According to forecasts in the Navitas report, from 2025 to 2030, the compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of the data center SiC device market will reach as high as 53%~65%, far exceeding the growth rate of the overall SiC market (13%~14%). The market size in the field of data center power semiconductor devices will be approximately 1.1 billion USD, which is on a similar scale to the overall data center GaN market. Both share the characteristics of being indispensable, highly certain, and difficult to be downgraded or substituted.
Data Source: Navitas report, Yole Group report data
II. Value Reconstruction: The "High Premium" of SiC in Data Centers
·Monetizing Ultimate Conversion Efficiency (Saving Electricity Costs): The physical characteristics of SiC devices almost eliminate reverse recovery losses, significantly reducing energy waste during high-frequency switching and reduce power loss in high-voltage branches by approximately one percentage point. This improvement allows power supplies to easily meet the 80 PLUS Titanium standard (96% efficiency at 50% load) and reduces waste heat emissions by 52%, greatly alleviating the burden on computer room air conditioning. Overall, the substantial drop in cooling load can push the power usage effectiveness (PUE) of data centers to its theoretical limit. If adopted globally, it could save approximately 10 TWh in massive electricity costs annually.
·Surge in Single-Rack BOM Cost Proportion (Saving Space): SiC allows power modules to operate at higher frequencies, thereby significantly reducing the volume of expensive passive components (such as inductors and capacitors). In applications where data centers directly connect to the medium-voltage grid, SiC devices can shrink the volume of solid-state transformers (SST) by more than 70%, while simultaneously cutting losses on the access side by 25%-40%, reconstructing the cost structure of the power architecture.
·Spillover of Automotive-Grade Reliability Technology (Preventing System Crashes): Relying on an extremely high operating junction temperature of up to 175°C-200°C and a thermal conductivity more than three times that of silicon, SiC demonstrates exceptional conductive resistance temperature stability. When dealing with sudden high-current loads generated by AI training, the power system will not experience a sharp increase in resistance and efficiency collapse due to rapid temperature rise, providing highly reliable high-voltage stable operation guarantees.
III. Turf War Among International Giants: Technology Paths Determine Business Strategies
In the field of hard technology, technical capability determines whether a company is qualified to sit at the table and share the profits,while business models determine whether companies can sustain operations to capture profits. Although international giants have long passed the R&D stage from 0 to 1 in the data center SiC device track, facing the huge sunk risks brought by technological reconstruction, deep path dependence has already led to the differentiation of their business models.
Representative of Trench Structure's "Performance Hegemony": Infineon
Technical Trump Card: Infineon has abandoned the traditional planar structure. Through its proprietary asymmetric trench design and globally leading 20-micron wafer thinning technology, it has largely eliminated the JFET effect, approaching the physical limits of the material in reducing high-frequency switching losses.
Commercial Monetization and Strategic Positioning (Earning Money from Technology Premium): The price of the trench route is a long R&D cycle and extremely high difficulty in yield ramp-up, but in exchange, it gains absolute pricing power in the cutting-edge market.
In extreme AI accelerator scenarios where single-rack power approaches 100kW+ (such as NVIDIA's GB200 liquid-cooled full rack), customers are extremely insensitive to device procurement prices but have "extreme" requirements for heat dissipation and energy efficiency metrics. Infineon focuses on ultimate energy efficiency, monopolizing scenarios such as supercomputing and extreme AI accelerators that have strict requirements for efficiency. At the same time, Infineon promotes a Si/SiC/GaN hybrid architecture, providing top-tier customers with system-level highly customized optimal solutions from a more macro perspective.
Other Key Players on the Same Technology Path: WolfSpeed, Navitas (under strategic transformation)
Representative of Planar Structure's Certainty Strategy: onsemi
Technical Trump Card: onsemi did not blindly follow the radical innovation of the first-generation trench, but pushed the classic planar structure to its absolute limit. Although planar structures have a slightly lower theoretical efficiency ceiling than trench structures, its advantages lie in its extremely mature process, exceptionally high yield, and excellent reliability (FIT value) performance under extreme operating conditions.
Commercial Monetization and Strategic Positioning (Earning Money from Scale and Certainty): onsemi's core business logic is "capacity and certainty." onsemi pursues a fully vertically integrated route (connecting the entire chain from powder, crystal growth substrates to device packaging and testing). When facing Internet giants building hyperscale data centers, what onsemi sells is ultimate supply chain security.
At the same time, its products are deeply bound to the data center ORV3 standard, greatly shortening the power supply introduction cycle for customers. Amid the capacity anxiety brought by the AI arms race, onsemi has secured massive long-term orders relying on "scaled and stable delivery."
Other Key Players on the Same Technology Path: STMicroelectronics, Rohm
Special Players: System-Level Service Providers
While device manufacturers are desperately competing on performance, other giants have adopted special strategies. They do not rely on the performance of a single silicon carbide chip to win, but rather monopolize the "brain" (control chips) and "nerves" (driver chips) of server power supplies to sell one-stop solutions to customers.
· Renesas Electronics: Strong bundled sales of server power supply "control chips" and "SiC/GaN power chips."
· Microchip Technology: Providing a full set of solutions of "SiC devices + dedicated control and drive," earning money by lowering the threshold for customer R&D and trial-and-error.
· Texas Instruments (TI): Providing complete power supply reference design drawings, utilizing path dependence to achieve order lock-in for the full set of materials.
IV. Domestic Market: "Automotive-Grade Dimensionality Reduction" and Realization of Substantial Commercial Orders
Driven by the domestic demands of "East Data West Computing" and autonomous and controllable computing power, domestic SiC manufacturers are entering the market by leveraging local response speeds and a 20%-30% cost-performance advantage.
More importantly, China's massive new energy vehicle (NEV) industry chain provides a strong "dimensionality reduction spillover" effect for data centers. Data center customers are extremely risk-averse, while domestic SiC devices have undergone the most stringent automotive-grade (AEC-Q101) validation and hundreds of millions of kilometers of real-vehicle road tests in the highly competitive domestic automakers' main drive inverters and OBCs. This massive accumulation of failure analysis (FIT) data directly eliminates the concerns of server contract manufacturers regarding the "long-term reliability" of domestic devices,enabling rapid migration of high-quality domestic automotive-grade production capacity to carrier-grade data center deployments.
Generally, because power supply manufacturers exercise extremely strict information control over the bill of materials, there is relatively little publicly verifiable information. Currently, using "officially disclosed clear data center power supply batch orders and delivery records" as the screening criteria, two domestic enterprises have taken the lead in crossing the commercial chasm:
Sanan Optoelectronics
Technical Trump Card: Sanan is one of the very few domestic manufacturers with full industry chain vertical integration capabilities from "powder - substrate - epitaxy - chip - packaging."
Commercial Monetization: Sanan is fighting a full industry chain cost war. According to its official disclosures and financial report caliber, Sanan's silicon carbide power devices have achieved substantial and stable batch supply among benchmark customers in the segmented application markets of "server power supplies" and "communication power supplies." For domestic medium-sized data centers and PSU contract manufacturers pursuing a balance in total cost of ownership (TCO), Sanan has the capability to cross the validation cycle and achieve steady-state delivery.
Zhanxin Electronics (Unlisted)
Technical Trump Card: Zhanxin's core advantage lies in its deep understanding of SiC drive circuits, with products focusing on "drive compatibility." Its MOSFET design allows PSU manufacturers to achieve rapid replacement (Pin-to-Pin ultra-fast replacement) without significantly modifying the original silicon-based drive solutions.
Commercial Monetization: Targeting the high-density server power supply market, focusing on the window dividend of domestic supply chain backup. In mid-2025, Zhanxin officially announced that its 3rd generation 1200V 35mΩ SiC MOSFET products, specifically designed for high-frequency and high-power density power supplies, have won orders from multiple key customers, achieving "mass production delivery of nearly 2 million units." This marks that it has captured a highly significant market share in the core high-voltage main power loop.
In addition, official financial reports explicitly mention that in the field of data center power supply SiC devices, manufacturers with intentions for market expansion and strategic transformation, or those that have already entered the small-batch validation stage, also include: Macmic Science & Technology, Silan Microelectronics, China Resources Micro, and Basic Semiconductor (under review for Hong Kong stock exchange listing).
V. Key Signals of Industrial Transformation
·Design Wins from Top Power Supply Equipment Manufacturers: Domestic manufacturers are rapidly building localized supply chain resilience and closely cooperating with core domestic PSU contract manufacturers for product customization. The ability to respond to demands and provide spot supply within an extremely short time is the core weight for securing design-win orders.
The "Yield Bucket Effect" for the full 8-inch SiC supply Chain: The core focus of the industry has shifted from a single "substrate yield" to the "overall yield of the full chain." In the future, those who can realize the cost reduction dividend of 8-inch will inevitably be IDM enterprises or mutually bound supply chain ecosystems with full-chain defect control capabilities from "substrate - epitaxy - wafer fabrication - packaging and testing."
·Supply Chain Differentiation: International brands possess over 20 years of failure analysis (FIT) data and still dominate in financial-grade core data centers (with a share of over 80%). The future market competition and cooperation will show a clear differentiation between high-voltage ultra-high performance (dominated by international players) and cost balance/customized response (advantage of domestic players).
VI. Conclusion and Outlook
Future investment value points will extend from single-point devices to the overall "Energy Internet," including solid-state circuit breakers (SSCB) capable of microsecond-level interruption and Si/SiC/GaN hybrid power architectures.
The competitive strategies at the enterprise level will diverge. The choices currently predictable by the author include:
Cost and Supply Chain Certainty: Improving the 8-inch SiC mass production comprehensive first-pass yield from substrate to chip finished products (any manufacturer usually only emphasizes the yield of a single link), retaining bargaining power on the client side through stable alliances between upstream and downstream in the supply chain.
Hidden Champion Model: Pursuing extreme technical indicators at key nodes and monopolizing products/technology/capacity in segmented fields.
System Integrator Model: Strengthening customer dependence at the ecological level through customized service models and one-stop system solutions. This model is an arena for the strong, requiring extremely high reliability endorsements. In the event of accident losses, it will face system-level joint and several liability.
References
1. Navitas report: https://ir.navitassemi.com/static-files/11be6fcd-5fb9-47d1-a006-51facff3f144
2. Infineon public technical materials:
https://www.infineon.com/assets/row/public/documents/60/54/infineon-sic-mosfet-for-mainstream-adoption-bodospower-article-en.pdf?fileId=5546d462636cc8fb0164596f094b0e0f
3. onsemi public technical materials:
https://www.perceptive-ic.com/news-detailed/Developments-in-the-Automotive-Silicon-Carbide-Revolution