EPC Power Corporation is entering the AI data center market with its first projects specifically designed to support the sector’s massive and unpredictable power demand.

The California-based inverter manufacturer, known for its energy storage-first engineering approach, is deploying its modular 5 MW inverters for a sub-50 MW data center installation in partnership with UtilityInnovation Group. Larger projects — each over 100 MW — are scheduled to follow shortly thereafter.

“It was kind of right place, right time, right experience,” said Adam Kabulski, SVP of sales and marketing at EPC Power.

Kabulski said EPC entered the market not by design but by capability. “I don’t think anyone woke up and said, ‘we’re going to become a data center manufacturer.’ It was more of the challenge brought us into it,” he said. “You look at what a data center is. And it’s a combination of a huge microgrid, but it’s also grid connected.”

“You’ve got to have experience working with utilities, as well as working on off-grid applications,” he said. “You’ve got to be able to pair with renewable generation, thermal, conventional generation, batteries. Not a whole lot of people have that experience and could walk in and say, not only can I do it, I have done it.”

AI training loads, driven by high-performance computing clusters, are now among the most volatile electrical loads on the grid. Facilities can surge from idle to full power in just 10 milliseconds, Kabulski said — a level of volatility that legacy systems were never designed to handle.

“No industry has seen something like that before,” he added. “If all of these systems are training at the same time, it’s creating 10, 20, 30% volatility across the entire grid.”

With data centers scaling into the hundreds of megawatts and larger, an abrupt loss of load or an unstable power draw could lead to cascading failures across the grid. On the other side, traditional gas generators struggle to keep up with the speed and frequency of demand fluctuations, often resulting in mechanical failures such as snapped generator shafts.

EPC’s solution lies in its battery energy storage systems powered by grid-forming inverters, designed from the ground up for energy storage rather than adapted from solar applications. These systems act like electrical “shock absorbers,” smoothing out fluctuations by instantly injecting or absorbing power to stabilize both the facility and the grid.

The EPC system mirrors the load in real time, Kabulski said, making it look and feel like a traditional UPS. But instead of supporting outages for 10 or 15 minutes, it can ride through for hours — while offsetting sharp spikes and drops.

Each EPC inverter is modular and grid-forming capable by default, allowing for redundant system designs that meet “five-nines” uptime expectations. The rack-mounted units are field-replaceable, ensuring rapid recovery from failures without downtime.

The company’s pedigree includes deployments worldwide, including one of the largest such installations in Australia. Kabulski noted that this experience — combined with a US-based supply chain — has made the company a preferred partner for hyperscalers looking to de-risk deployments.

EPC is positioned to serve both grid-connected and standalone configurations, with compatibility across all battery chemistries and DC generation sources, including fuel cells and photovoltaics, Kabulski said.

He added that while EPC has long provided grid-forming BESS capabilities, real-world testing with AI loads is a critical step in validating EPC’s approach.

“As the training algorithms evolve, as they change, the system changes with the grid — as you would expect. That’s what we’re going to learn over those first few months.”

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