Bringing more electricity into data center aisles from less floor space. This is the objective of the new Galaxy VXL inverter that Schneider Electric is now marketing as a replacement for the old Galaxy VX. Measuring 1.2 meters wide and 1 meter deep, the new equipment provides 500 to 1,250 kilowatts to the servers. The previous one gave them up to 1500 kW, but over a width of 6.2 meters.
“It’s a record!” We are very proud. We are 30% denser than our closest competitor,” rejoices Pierre Antoine Louvot, regional director of the UPS offer at Schneider.
This year, Eaton, Schneider Electric’s closest competitor in this market, launched the 9395X inverter. This offers a power of 1000 to 1700 kW, but with a width of 3.2 meters (a single arrival for electric current) or 3.6 meters (two arrivals). Mathematically, the Galaxy VXL is actually denser, since three of its units aligned over 3.6 meters would offer 3750 kW.
“The challenge is to free up floor space for our customers, which are private or shared data centers, hosting providers, as well as companies that sell computer room space. Inverters are square meters that bring nothing to our customers, other than a utility function. With the Galaxy VXL, we are freeing up square meters that they can use to host IT, which in turn brings them money,” he adds, with the same enthusiasm.
A UPS is the equipment that, in a data center, regulates current to protect server power supplies against surges or voltage variations in the public power grid, which could be fatal to electronic devices. It is generally coupled to batteries which it charges when necessary and from which it draws reserve energy in the event of a power outage.
This equipment is all the more important as the input current in a data center is three-phase (single-phase in homes and offices), each phase having its own waveform.
A new technology against electric shocks
Schneider Electric’s new product doesn’t just densify its insides. These also take the form of ten blocks of 3U height, which provide 125 kW each and which are extractable; on the previous model, these blocks only provided 50 kW.
The Galaxy VXL also introduces a new device, based on tactile connectors, surrounded by a pseudo-plastic material patented by Schneider, and access flaps which only unlock when security conditions are met.
“We call these modules Live Swap, which means that they are hot extractable and insertable, like ordinary Hot Swap modules, but they do not present a risk of electric shock during these manipulations. In this case, electric arcs can form when inserting or extracting a Hot Swap module. They are potentially very dangerous, because 1250 kW represents almost 2000 amps! Live Swap modules avoid this risk,” explains Pierre Antoine Louvot.
On the one hand, the new material surrounding the connectors reduces the energy level on the surface of the mechanism to 1.2 calories per square centimeter. This prevents air ionization (the reason for arcing) until the module’s connectors are very close to those on the chassis. Furthermore, the connectors at the back of the basket are hidden behind a flap which only opens when the inserted module is almost at the end of its travel.
In fact, if arcs were to occur, they would be of low intensity and would be limited to the bottom of the module insertion tunnel. As this is obstructed by the body of the module, Schneider ensures that there is no risk that an electric shock could travel back to the manipulator located on the other side of the module.
Arc flashes aren’t just dangerous for technicians. They are also often the cause of fires in data centers.
An efficiency that would save three times the price of the inverter
Schneider Electric claims that its Galaxy VXL inverter would have an efficiency of 99.3%, compared to 95% for all inverters. Eaton says for its part that it achieves 99% efficiency. The efficiency corresponds to the electricity that is actually usable by the servers, despite the resistance of the materials in the modules, which dissipate part of the energy as heat when they regulate the output voltage.
This efficiency would be made possible by derivation techniques which filter the shape of the electrical wave (“which compensate for harmonics”, says Schneider Electric more precisely). The name of this technique is not very clear: the documentation provided by the manufacturer sometimes mentions “eConversion”, sometimes “ECOnversion mode”. In any case, this technique would equip all Galaxy V series inverters since 2014.
A priori, the maximum yield is not sustainable in 100% of cases. When the servers all demand a certain high level of energy at the same time, the inverters would switch to Double Conversion mode. According to figures communicated by suppliers, the efficiency of Schneider Electric’s Galaxy VXL would then drop to 97.3% and that of Eaton’s 9395X to 97.5%. Schneider Electric claims that the Galaxy VXL switches to Double Conversion mode less often than its competitor.
According to the Galaxy VXL documentation, the existence of ECOnversion mode would generally save three times the price of the inverter in ten years on the electricity bill. The documentation mentions a saving of €29,700 per inverter. Pierre Antoine Louvot speaks instead of practically a million euros in savings over 15 years on the scale of a data center campus. LeMagIT deduces that it evokes such savings for a site equipped with around twenty Galaxy VXLs, with a total power of around 25 megawatts.
This power generally corresponds to 17,000 m² of computer rooms. Unless customers buy duplicate inverters, for redundancy in the event of a breakdown.
To give an idea, in La Courneuve, in the Paris region, the largest data center in France, the Paris Digital Park (aka Digital Reality PAR8), which should be operational this year, is supposed to offer 80 MW of electrical power for 43,200 m² of computer rooms. In Marseille, the same Digital Reality is building a new giant data center, MRS5, which should offer, by 2026, between 18 and 22 MW of electrical power for 12,000 m² of computer rooms. On the Gravelines campus, the four OVHcloud data centers total 50 MW for 32,000 m² of computer rooms.
Densify inverters to provide more electricity to AI
Beyond Schneider’s ecological and economic arguments, the trend on the ground seems rather that data centers are not going to particularly reduce the floor space occupied by their inverters. Because server consumption is growing as much as the density of Schneider Electric equipment. Because of AI. Dell is thus starting to market 2U servers which consume up to 4.5 kilowatt hours, while its pre-AI models consumed more than 2 kWh.
Certainly, these new servers compensate for their propensity to become more and more energy-intensive with liquid cooling, which consumes much less electricity than fans. Schneider Electric also wants to be at the forefront in this area, too. On average, fans increase server consumption by 50%, while liquid cooling only increases it by 4%. But even in these conditions, the bays need more electricity anyway. So many inverters, but more powerful.
This is what the Galaxy VXL also offers: over a width of 6 meters, it offers 6,250 kilowatts, more than four times the power of the Galaxy VX for an equivalent surface area. Ultimately, Galaxy VXL makes it possible to install AI servers without consuming more square footage for inverters.
It should also be noted that Schneider Electric published at the same time a report on the impact of AI on data center consumption. At first glance, this report confirms that it will be necessary to bring more and more electricity into data centers, at least until 2030, to power as many servers as before, but more and more energy-consuming because of the ‘AI.
The report draws four scenarios. If the heavy training of fundamental models is gradually reduced in favor of generative AI processing, which consumes less computing power, the data center market will go from a global consumption of 100 terawatt hours in 2025 to 785 TWh in 2035. pace of LLM training does not weaken, then the global consumption of data centers would reach 1370 TWh in 2035.
In the other two scenarios, the report takes into account the shortage of energy production. In this case, global data center consumption for generative AI would peak at 595 TWh in 2033, then slowly decline. The report mentions 570 TWh in 2035. If we cannot do without driving as many LLMs as ever, then global data center consumption would reach its peak in 2030, with 670 TWh, then collapse to 190 TWh in 2035.
