Walk into any AI data center and you will find the same mismatch. The servers run on direct current. The power arriving from the utility is alternating current. Between the two, electricity changes form several times before it does any useful work, and each change burns off energy as heat and takes up room in the rack. With operators racing to add capacity, that overhead adds up quickly.
The mismatch is a leftover from a fight more than a century old.
In 1882 Thomas Edison opened the first commercial power plant in the U.S. on Pearl Street in Manhattan, and it ran on direct current. Think of DC as water moving one way through a hose. George Westinghouse bet on alternating current, which surges back and forth like a tide. AC paired well with transformers, which could send power over long distances, and that made a centralized grid practical. The rivalry turned nasty, with Edison staging the electrocution of an elephant to scare people off AC. Westinghouse won, and the grid has run on AC since.
Direct current never disappeared. It ran railways, telegraphs and the early phone network. In the 1970s, people living off the grid lit their cabins with 12-volt bulbs and car batteries. Then electronics arrived. Phones, laptops, TVs and LED lights all need DC, so every one of them converts power through the little adapter plugged into the wall. Across billions of devices, those small losses never stop.
Solar made the case stronger. A solar panel produces DC and a battery stores it, yet the grid converts that power to AC to move it, then back to DC to use it.
Electricity demand is climbing for the first time in decades, and the load behind it runs on DC from end to end. AI servers use it and the batteries that back them up store it. Hyperscalers chasing speed to power are adding solar and storage, and with DC sources feeding DC loads, a detour through AC makes less and less sense. Nvidia is pushing the industry toward high-voltage DC, and suppliers old and new are designing for it.
Merge4 builds solid-state DC power distribution for this shift. Transistors replace the mechanical levers that have protected circuits for a century, so protection acts in microseconds and nothing arcs. AC will keep running the wider grid. Inside the data center, the case for Edison's current has never been stronger.
Anna is a serial entrepreneur, CEO, and strategist working at the intersection of AI, energy, and critical infrastructure. She holds a Ph.D in smart grid technology and writes for Forbes on AI, electrification, and the modernization of energy systems.
