A San Diego startup's power technology will get its first real-world test inside UC San Diego's supercomputer center on the La Jolla campus, backed by $8.48 million from the California Energy Commission.
The project pairs Alderbuck Energy, a San Diego company with 11 to 50 employees, with SDG&E and UC San Diego to demonstrate whether a new approach to delivering electricity can cut energy waste at AI data centers by about 25%. UC San Diego announced the grant on Monday, Aug. 24.
The San Diego Supercomputer Center, housed within UC San Diego's Halıcıoğlu School of Data Science and Computing, will serve as the live test bed. The project team says it could become the first field validation of a medium-voltage solid-state transformer at an operational California data center.
What the technology does
At the core is Alderbuck's Nexus Power Unit, a solid-state transformer that converts 12-kilovolt alternating current directly into 800-volt direct current through a single device. Traditional data centers route power through multiple conversion stages before it reaches computing hardware; each stage loses energy as heat.
"Every unnecessary conversion stage between the grid and the computation is energy lost, and at AI scale, that adds up fast," said Brian Balderston, director of infrastructure and data centers for SDSC's Research Data Services Division. "… This project shows us what a better path looks like in practice and will produce the real-world evidence that moves this architecture from promising to proven."
The project aims to serve two megawatts of AI computing load while shrinking power equipment footprint by more than 50%. According to Alderbuck's announcement, the Nexus Power Unit targets a 4% energy-efficiency improvement at the hardware level, with broader system-level savings of about 25% when paired with workload-management software from partner Emerald AI.
For context: a single rack of AI hardware can now draw up to 50 times more electricity than a conventional server rack installed just a few years ago, according to the project team.
Local partners
SDG&E will serve as utility technical advisor and grid integration partner, providing expertise on utility operations, communications standards and data center load characteristics. Miguel Romero, SDG&E's senior vice president and chief commercial officer, said the project creates an opportunity to evaluate approaches that could help large energy users operate more efficiently while providing insights for grid planning and long-term affordability.
Alderbuck Energy, which raised a $750,000 seed round in November 2024 according to LinkedIn data, develops power conversion systems for data centers and EV charging infrastructure. Kimberly McGrath, the company's chief strategy officer, said the deployment will show how medium-voltage-to-DC infrastructure can help operators bring high-density compute capacity online faster.
Jan Kleissl, director of UC San Diego's DERConnect testing facility and a professor at the Jacobs School of Engineering, serves as principal investigator on the CEC award alongside Balderston and Mike Ferry, director of UC San Diego's Energy Storage Group. UC San Diego is the prime contractor.
Workforce program
The grant also funds what the project team calls one of California's first equity-centered data center workforce development efforts. The Good For Others Foundation, a San Diego nonprofit led by president and CEO John Valencia, will develop a career pathway program connecting residents of disadvantaged communities with jobs in data center operations.
The project will also produce a load-capacity planning tool for California policymakers and utilities to model how large electricity users, including AI data centers and EV fast-charging stations, can be integrated into the grid. Before live installation at SDSC, the transformer will undergo hardware-in-the-loop testing at DERConnect, UC San Diego's $42 million NSF-funded facility on campus.
