AI’s Power Demand Is Rewriting RECOM’s Five-Decade Playbook

Global data center power demand is set to climb 27% this year to 132 gigawatts, Gartner forecasts, a surge large enough to make electricity delivery, not chip supply, the tightest constraint on the AI buildout. RECOM Power, a German power-conversion module maker, is wagering its future on becoming one of the suppliers that fixes that bottleneck.

Harry Gu, managing director of RECOM Asia, told EE Times Asia at COMPUTEX 2026, the Taipei trade show, that AI is making the power electronics market “much more complicated.” The company is responding by pushing past its traditional DC-DC converter business into chips, transformers and reference designs of its own.

RECOM Bets Beyond the DC-DC Converter

RECOM built its name on compact, board-mounted DC-DC converters, modules that step voltage up or down while keeping sensitive circuits isolated from electrical noise. RECOM Asia, the regional arm established in 2004, has handled much of that business across the Asia-Pacific region ever since.

Now the company is layering something new on top. Instead of selling only finished modules, RECOM is offering its own power management ICs (PMICs, chips that regulate and convert power on a board) alongside transformers and pre-qualified reference schematics and PCB layouts that customers can build around.

“We want to simplify power supply design,” Gu said. “Customers can choose a module or they can choose our IC plus transformer solution depending on their production volume.”

The discrete approach targets customers whose annual output tops 50,000 units, the point where designing around individual chips and transformers can undercut a finished module on cost while still trimming development time. Gu framed the advantage as structural rather than incidental. “We know the full power supply design,” he said. “We’re not only an IC company or only a transformer company.”

Why Electricity Beat Silicon as AI’s Tightest Constraint

Data center power demand is climbing faster than utilities can add supply, and 2026 forecasts largely agree on the direction even where they differ on scale. That has made megawatts, not GPUs, the resource AI companies now fight hardest to secure.

Gartner forecasts global electricity consumption will climb to 565 terawatt-hours this year, up from 447 TWh in 2025, with power availability now described as the binding constraint on AI expansion. Goldman Sachs Research expects US demand to nearly double to 66 gigawatts by 2027.

AI-optimized servers alone are on pace to draw about 175 terawatt-hours this year, rising to roughly 258 TWh in 2027, the point where they consume more electricity than every conventional server combined, according to Gartner’s data. Gu sees that shift from the supplier side. “Twenty years ago, everybody thought power supply was a mature, dying market,” he said. “But suddenly the market trend changed.”

The Business Power Supplies Weren’t Supposed to Have

RECOM was founded in Germany in 1974 and spent decades expanding from board-level converters into AC-DC power supplies, switching regulators, LED drivers and higher-power systems for industrial, medical, railway, mobility, renewable-energy and automation customers.

Twenty years ago, everybody thought power supply was a mature, dying market. But suddenly the market trend changed.

That reversal shows up in RECOM Asia’s own numbers. After navigating the industry correction that followed the semiconductor boom of 2021 and 2022, the regional business grew roughly 20% last year and is targeting 25% to 30% growth this year, Gu said.

The transition has also exposed shortages across the supplier base itself, including qualified analog engineers, power supply designers, manufacturing capacity and magnetic component expertise. “As power density gets much higher, everybody wants smaller size with higher power,” Gu said.

Smaller Racks, Bigger EMI Headaches

Higher operating frequencies shrink converter size, but they also generate more electromagnetic interference (EMI, electrical noise that can disrupt nearby circuits) just as AI processors are running at lower and lower voltages that make them more vulnerable to that noise.

“If you cannot make it smaller, you will have a lot of problems,” Gu said. “Higher operating frequencies create a lot of EMI, and that will disturb the CPU.” Thermal management compounds the problem. “Everything is related,” he said. “The higher the power density, the more critical heat distribution becomes.”

The International Energy Agency found AI server power density has jumped elevenfold since 2020, and engineers researching the problem describe the load itself as inherently unstable. A recent IEEE Power Electronics Society briefing warned of severe transients capable of disrupting grid reliability as AI workloads swing from idle to full load in fractions of a second.

• 11 times – how much AI server power density increased between 2020 and 2025, per the IEA
• Fourfold – the further density increase the IEA expects by 2027
• 65 households – the peak power one refrigerator-sized AI server rack could draw by 2027, the IEA estimates
• 84% – the year-over-year jump in electricity that AI-optimized servers alone will draw this year, Gartner data show

Every one of those numbers lands on the same desk: the power engineer’s, not the chip designer’s.

RECOM’s Reach Now Stretches to 75 Kilowatts

RECOM’s portfolio expansion isn’t limited to small board-level parts. The company is developing platforms that scale far beyond its traditional range, aimed at applications well outside a typical server rack.

• 3kW to 6kW – mid-range supplies for general industrial and automation equipment
• 10kW to 20kW – platforms built for heavier automation and robotics loads
• 75kW – the top of the range, aimed at EV charging, bidirectional power conversion, hydrogen fuel cells and industrial power systems

“Our goal is to become a one-stop solution, from the sensors to the whole power supply system,” Gu said. Industrial automation, robotics and medical equipment remain core markets even though they run at lower volumes than consumer electronics or automotive, he said, as intelligent industrial systems and motor drives create demand for more flexible power architectures.

Geopolitics Enters the Power Supply Chain

Technology aside, Gu named geopolitical uncertainty as the industry’s other defining pressure. “Product delivery security has become one of the key topics,” he said. “You cannot put everything into the same basket.”

RECOM has responded by adding manufacturing capacity in Thailand, beyond its traditional Taiwan and China facilities, while evaluating further expansion into Malaysia for select products. Higher-power products stay in Europe, spreading the company’s production across regions in case any single site gets cut off. RECOM is also investing in electronics manufacturing services partnerships so production can shift between regions if needed.

The strain RECOM is hedging against is already visible upstream. Eric Schmidt, Google’s former chief executive, told Congress the US needs 29 gigawatts of extra power within two years, and 67 more by 2030. Some of that strain is already killing projects outright: more than 75 data center projects worth $130 billion stalled in the first months of 2026 amid local opposition over power and water use.

For a company that spends its days inside DC-DC converters and transformer windings, that is the real customer pitch: the grid is tightening, and somebody has to build the parts that make every watt count.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a power management IC?

A power management IC, or PMIC, is a chip that regulates, converts or distributes electrical power on a circuit board, jobs that once required several separate components. RECOM now designs its own PMICs alongside the transformers they pair with, rather than treating the chip and the magnetic component as unrelated purchases.

How fast is data center electricity demand actually growing?

The IEA’s base case has global data center electricity consumption growing around 15% a year through 2030, more than four times faster than electricity demand growth in every other sector combined, reaching roughly 945 terawatt-hours by the end of the decade.

Which US regions face the tightest power squeeze from data centers?

Goldman Sachs Research found that by 2027, annual data center additions in the Mid-Atlantic, Texas and Mid-Continent power markets will each individually exceed the entire country’s total additions in 2025, with power reliability risk running highest in the Mid-Atlantic, Mid-Continent and Northwest.

How much of a data center’s power goes to cooling instead of computing?

Cooling can account for anywhere from about 7% of total consumption in an efficient hyperscale data center to more than 30% in a less efficient enterprise facility, according to the IEA, which is why thermal design matters as much as raw electrical capacity.

Could AI data centers get built faster than currently planned?

Goldman Sachs Research says elevated capital spending could compress construction timelines to as little as one year, though the bank also cautions that only about 60% of capacity scheduled for next year is likely to arrive on time, falling to roughly 50% two years out.

How much has US data center electricity use grown in recent years?

The Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory found US data centers used about 176 terawatt-hours of electricity in 2023, projecting that figure could reach between 325 and 580 terawatt-hours by 2028 depending on how fast AI adoption scales.