China Renewables & Utilities Sector: Weekly #90: Takeaways from expert call on China ESS and data center power systems

Research evidence excerpt

China Renewables & Utilities Sector: Weekly #90: Takeaways from expert call on China ESS and data center power systems

Deutsche Bank

Research

Asia Industry Date

Alternative Energy China Renewables & 12 July 2026

Utilities Sector

Weekly #90: Takeaways from expert call on

Gary Zhou, CFA China ESS and data center power systems

Research Analyst

+852-2203-5889

DB weekly comment

Takeaways from expert call on ESS and data centre power systems

On 10 July 2026, we hosted an expert call with Mr. Wei Wang, Chief Technical

Engineer at Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd., who is responsible for the

development of PV and energy storage products and strategy. The discussion

focused on China's ESS market and the evolving power infrastructure

requirements of AI data centers.

• Data center and solid-state transformers (SSTs): The expert believes AI

data center power infrastructure is gradually evolving from traditional

UPS-based architectures toward HVDC and ultimately SST-based

designs. While efficiency differences among leading architectures are

relatively modest, SST may offer attractive system-level advantages

through lower cost, a smaller footprint and shorter deployment cycles,

making it a potentially compelling long-term solution for high-density AI

data centers. Current SST deployments remain limited, and efficiency

performance still appears to vary meaningfully across vendors. While

leading products are believed to be capable of sustaining ~98.5%

efficiency across a broad operating range, the expert noted that some

solutions may be closer to 97–97.5% based on industry checks and

project feedback. Beyond peak efficiency, operating range, power

quality, voltage stability and long-term reliability are expected to become

increasingly important differentiators as SST adoption scales beyond