Executive Interview with Raghu Belur, Co

Raghu co-founded Enphase Energy with Martin Fornage in 2006. He has more than 25 years of experience in the clean energy and high‑technology industries, and has been at the forefront of developing Enphase’s leading integrated energy system—with solar generation, storage, monitoring, and control. Prior to Enphase, Raghu developed high‑speed optical communication technology for Cerent, which was later acquired by Cisco Systems. Before Cerent, Raghu was an engineer at the Indian Institute of Science, where he played a key role in the development of an alternative energy gasification system. Tell us about your company? Enphase Energy designs power electronics for homes, businesses and, now, AI data centers. We are the world’s leading supplier of microinverter-based solar and battery systems, with approximately 89.4 million microinverters shipped and about 5.3 million Enphase-based systems in more than 165 countries. Our newest platform, the IQ Solid-State Transformer (IQ SST), converts medium-voltage AC directly to 800 VDC for AI data centers. It runs on our own control silicon, gallium nitride (GaN) switching and high-frequency magnetics, built on two decades of semiconductor design and high-volume manufacturing. What problems are you solving? AI is breaking the old model for data center power. Rack densities are climbing from hundreds of kilowatts toward a megawatt, and AI workloads swing rapidly between low and full power. Conventional architectures that stack transformers, UPS systems, converters, and batteries can’t efficiently support this. IQ SST converts medium-voltage AC directly to 800 VDC or ±400 VDC in a single stage, responds in under a millisecond and spreads the load across hundreds of small, redundant modules, so the system stays up and is easy to service. What application areas are your strongest? Our core strengths are distributed power conversion, custom silicon, intelligent controls, and high-volume manufacturing, and today we are applying these to AI data centers. IQ SST is designed for 800 VDC and ±400 VDC rack architectures and scales up to 5 MW rack deployments. Operators can pair it with local battery storage near the compute or with a centralized battery energy storage system that keeps batteries out of the white space and reduces maintenance near the racks. Over time, we see the same architecture extending to utility-scale solar and storage, high-power DC fast charging, and other grid-scale power markets. What keeps your customers up at night? Operators need to power increasingly dense AI loads without adding cost, footprint, maintenance or new points of failure. IQ SST is built around that problem. A 5 MW rack is designed to combine hundreds of intelligent IQ SST power modules into a coordinated “supercluster” that keeps running with only 90% of modules active, supporting a 99.999% availability target. The modules are hot-swappable, so one can be replaced while the rest of the system keeps operating, without specialized technicians. What does the competitive landscape look like and how do you differentiate? As rack power rises, the industry is moving to higher-voltage DC and rethinking conventional multi-stage architectures. Most solid-state transformer designs rely on a few large power blocks, so losing one takes out a big share of capacity. IQ SST distributes the work across hundreds of small modules instead. We’re also not starting from scratch. We’ve spent 20 years building distributed power systems at scale, with a ninth-generation microinverter platform, a fifth-generation ASIC and approximately 2.5 GWh of battery storage shipped, and we’re bringing that semiconductor, manufacturing and reliability experience to data center power. What new features/technology are you working on? IQ SST is our main focus. It runs on our proprietary Kestrel ASIC and GaN power electronics for fast, efficient, software-controlled conversion. We expect to demonstrate full rack-scale systems in 2026, begin customer pilots in 2027 and target volume shipments in 2028. We’re also expanding into commercial and industrial energy, starting with the IQ Battery C80, our first commercial battery, which scales from 80 kWh to 2 MWh and is now open for pre-orders. All of this on top of big innovations around our core residential solar, battery, and EV charging products. How do customers normally engage with your company? For IQ SST, we are working directly with hyperscalers, data center operators, developers, utilities and power-infrastructure partners. Each engagement starts with the deployment: rack voltage, power density, utility interconnection, load profile, availability target and service model. From there, we determine whether local or centralized storage is the better fit. We’re also active in the Open Compute Project, helping shape open standards for higher-voltage DC power. Our residential and commercial customers reach us through installers and distributors, and increasingly directly through services like Enphase Care. Also Read: The Invisible Bottleneck Is Costing You Time You Can’t Get Back