Powering intelligence: How AI and electrification are reinventing each other
Blog Post | 28.10.2025 | 5 min read | Adrian Timbus and Aleksandar Grbic
Artificial intelligence (AI) is reshaping the foundations of modern life — from accelerating medical discoveries to autonomous vehicles, designing climate-resilient infrastructure to optimizing how the world produces and delivers energy. But every breakthrough in intelligence depends on something elemental: Power.
The next generation of “AI factories” — the data centers where AI is trained and deployed at scale — have become the new engines of the digital economy.
The 15× leap: Powering the age of AI
AI is redefining what it means to be energy-intensive. The latest 800-volt direct current (VDC) next-generation power architecture that Hitachi Energy is co-designing with NVIDIA enables a 15 times increase in power supply over traditional systems. To help meet this challenge, we provide advanced grid-to-rack technology that eliminates conversion losses, cuts cooling needs, and simplifies how electricity flows, accelerating the deployment of hyperscale AI facilities.
This is not the only innovation necessary to power the age of AI.
The power system was already one of the largest systems built by humankind. Driven by dramatic acceleration in demand growth and diversity of generation sources, it is expanding and deepening in complexity to the point that AI and fast computing power are essential enhancements to grid expertise.
For example, improved simulation solutions for grid planning and power flow optimization ensure not only efficient power system operation but also feasible scenarios and quick response models in case of severe contingencies, avoiding load shedding and possibly blackouts.
Additionally, the two technology leaders are taking on the challenge of integrating renewable energy through the 800 VDC solution, developing next-generation advanced control systems to transform variable wind and solar power generation into dispatchable assets.
Introducing AI technology in grid management and control systems transforms how grid and assets operators navigate the complexity of tomorrow’s grid – unlocking seamless renewable integration and securing resilient and reliable power delivery to critical infrastructures, including AI factories.
Power is the foundation of AI. To meet the energy requirements of giga-scale AI factories, we are enabling today’s AC distribution to evolve to 800 VDC, delivering greater efficiency and scalability.
That is why Hitachi Energy, along with NVIDIA, is developing solutions that combine power and intelligence.
These innovations are more than technical milestones. They are a blueprint for how computing and electrification must evolve together, and by enabling higher efficiency and smaller footprints, it opens a pathway toward AI infrastructure that scales while minimizing unnecessary wasted power.
AI’s growing energy footprint
Up to 125 gigawatts (GW) of AI data center capacity is forecasted to be developed globally between 2025 and 20301, comparable to Spain’s total installed generation capacity2. Generative AI alone could account for a tenfold rise in that demand this decade. As our recent paper, Gridlocked? AI’s Energy Appetite notes, grid congestion, equipment shortages, and renewable variability are already testing the limits of infrastructure worldwide.
The challenge is no longer theoretical: in key digital-hub regions from Northern Virginia to Frankfurt to Dublin, utilities are nearing their transmission limits and quite frankly, the future of AI will depend on whether our energy systems can keep up.
Scaling the infrastructure of intelligence
One way Hitachi Energy is addressing this challenge is by investing $9 billion globally, including $1 billion in the U.S., to expand production of transformers, switchgear, and advanced grid technologies – equipment critical to powering AI-driven data centers and building a robust, future-ready electric grid.
Such upgrades will underpin not only AI data centers but also the electrification of transport, industry, and cities.
Our team draws on its broader Think Beyond the Data Center philosophy — integrating energy, digital infrastructure, and operational technology into a single end-to-end ecosystem. This connection ensures that the breakthroughs developed at the grid edge align with the broader mission of powering sustainable, intelligent infrastructure across every sector.
To support economic growth and power the next industrial revolution in the AI era, the physical grid must scale as quickly as the digital one.
From energy consumer to energy partner
For decades, data centers were passive and steady consumers of electricity, but that model no longer works. The AI factory of the future must act as an energy hub — flexible, digitally connected, and capable of supporting the grid while also drawing from it.
Hitachi Energy is helping make that transition real. Through advanced power-electronics interfaces, battery energy storage systems, and grid-automation platforms, the company is collaborating on the NVIDIA DSX AI factory blueprint to turn AI infrastructure into dynamic assets that stabilize local grids, absorb renewable variability, and even provide ancillary services back to utilities.
Read more about the NVIDIA Omniverse DSX Blueprint.
Intelligence inside the infrastructure
AI is also becoming increasingly integral to how those systems operate. Within substations and transformer fleets, Hitachi Energy uses AI to monitor dissolved-gas levels, forecast component health, and predict failures before they occur — moving from reactive maintenance to predictive reliability. Across high-voltage networks, AI-enabled automation helps operators balance renewable generation and load in real time.
The same principles that drive large-language models are being applied to the energy domain: pattern recognition, adaptive learning, and optimization. How do Hitachi Energy’s platforms utilize AI?
- Power quality and stability: intelligent controllers smooth voltage fluctuations from spiky AI workloads.
- Grid-connection planning: AI-powered siting tools identify locations where carbon-free electricity and fiber connectivity align.
- Digital twins: full-scale virtual replicas of substations and data centers allow engineers to simulate loads, design upgrades, and optimize performance.
This convergence of operational intelligence and energy intelligence is transforming what it means to run a mission-critical power system.
Powering a purposeful intelligence
The debate about AI’s energy use often overlooks what that energy enables: scientific breakthroughs, smarter cities, cleaner manufacturing, faster medical advances. When electricity powers intelligence that improves lives, every kilowatt becomes an investment in progress.
Hitachi Energy’s goal? To make that progress sustainable and secure — to ensure that every electron powering AI is used efficiently. From predictive grid analytics and digital substations to the 800 VDC architectures built with NVIDIA, we’re combining over a century of pioneering mission-critical technologies to address the most urgent energy challenge of our time – balancing soaring electricity demand, while decarbonizing the power system.
If you’d like to speak to the team regarding your data center strategy, please don’t hesitate to contact us.
Further Information
