Vertiv PowerDirect 5000 800 VDC Sidecar — 400 to 900 kW Rack Power Delivery

Specifications

Overview

The Vertiv PowerDirect 5000 is the near-term expression of 800 VDC: a sidecar that sits beside the compute rack and delivers 400 kW to 900 kW of 800 VDC over a busbar. The problem it solves is physical rather than electrical - as rack power climbs from 140 kW today toward the 600 kW horizon, the 8 to 16U currently occupied by power shelves has to be given back to compute, and connector, busbar and copper volumes at 54 V stop fitting.

Vertiv places the AC breakdown point at 350-400 kW per rack. Past it, the sidecar approach lets an operator adopt higher-voltage DC at the rack without rebuilding the upstream power train: the facility keeps its AC infrastructure and the conversion moves to the pod. Vertiv also supports a bipolar 400 VDC topology, which many designers consider easier to serve with 650 V devices and simpler to isolate and ground than a monopolar 800 V bus.

The staged roadmap is explicit. Vertiv frames its 800 VDC portfolio as commercial in the second half of 2026 with deployments beginning in 2027, validated in a 1.5 MW AI-pod lab with customer GPU racks. It aligns with NVIDIA's MGX-compatible 800 VDC power rack, and the same architecture scales from a rack-adjacent sidecar through a row power center of up to 2 MW to a facility-level DC power block.

Key Benefits

Gives the rack back to silicon: recovers 8-16U of space that in-rack conversion currently consumes. No facility rebuild: keeps existing AC infrastructure and adds DC only at the rack. Voltage flexibility: supports both monopolar 800 V and bipolar 400 V DC topologies. Validation-first: 1.5 MW AI-pod lab testing before deployment commitments.

Applications

400 kW to 900 kW AI racks, GB200-class and Kyber-class GPU racks, brownfield data center power upgrades, row-level 800 VDC distribution, AI pod power architecture validation, MGX-compatible rack builds.

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