The transistor arrived in 1947 and went on to remake nearly everything we use. The circuit breaker in your basement is older. Its basic design dates to 1924, and inside it looks a lot like a pinball machine, with a piece of metal that physically moves to stop the current. Almost nothing else in daily life still works that way.
The Artemis II mission in April made the gap easy to see. Apollo astronauts in the 1960s flew with mechanical dials and a single computer that could barely hold a modern spreadsheet, and every course correction went in by hand. Orion carried two redundant digital control systems, each 20,000 times faster than Apollo's, with more than 1,200 sensors feeding software that adjusted on its own. Sixty years turned a manual spacecraft into an autonomous one.
The grid made no such leap. Hospitals, water systems and banks depend on it, and when it fails, customers still phone in the outage.
Computing, telephones and cars all swapped mechanical hardware for electronics that were smaller, faster and smarter. Silicon made that possible. High voltage and high current break silicon down, though, so power infrastructure stayed mechanical while everything around it went digital.
Silicon carbide and gallium nitride remove that limit. Both materials hold up under the loads power systems carry, which finally opens the grid to the technology that transformed computers. Established companies are already moving. In 2025 Eaton bought Resilient Power Systems, a startup making solid-state transformers.
AI data centers and electric vehicles are piling new demand onto a grid whose designers never planned for two-way power flows or millions of intelligent loads. Balancing all of it across that many connection points calls for the kind of fast digital control that guided Orion home.
That opening is why we started Merge4. Where the industry has always distributed power through mechanical equipment, Merge4 does it through silicon carbide transistors, so protection acts in microseconds, never arcs and never wears. Unlike a solid-state transformer, Merge4 works downstream in the distribution layer, at every node. The transistor took decades to reach power distribution, and we intend to make up the time.
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.
