The announcement of the company’s latest module power electronics project coincided with its first-quarter 2026 earnings results, which showed a 20.6% decline in year-on-year revenue amid a sharp decline in domestic demand.
At the end of his commentary on his company’s first-quarter 2026 earnings call, Enphase CEO Badri Kothandaraman had what could be described as a “one more thing” moment à la Steve Jobs.
The call previously focused on the company’s revenue and revenue data, which showed a steep decline of nearly 20.6% in quarterly revenue year-over-year, the company’s first negative quarterly net income in two years and lower expectations for the second quarter.
Despite the disappointing figures, Kothandaraman maintained a positive tone throughout the conversation. He noted that the company’s sales in Europe grew 36% in the first quarter compared to the fourth quarter of 2025, and discussed the rollout to four states of the exclusive Enphase system Propel prepaid lease product in the US and provided information on the latest versions of the company’s residential and commercial batteries and microinverters.
But he saved the biggest news for last: announcing the company’s development of the new IQ Solid-State Transformer (SST), a modular, 1.25 MW “supercluster” consisting of 342 hot-swappable power modules that can deliver 800V DC power directly to the latest NVIDIA computer architecture.
“AI is changing the way power is delivered to computing infrastructure,” Kothandaraman said in a statement accompanying the announcement. “For twenty years, Enphase has been building distributed, semiconductor, and software-defined power conversion systems at scale. As AI racks move toward 800 Vdc (400 Vdc) architectures and megawatt-scale densities, we believe distributed architecture is well suited for this transition, and that is what we are building.”
Despite the relatively poor numbers in the Q1 2026 announcement, at least one analyst sees positive long-term results in the SST announcement.
“We believe this opportunity is exciting and potentially meaningful in the coming years, but investors will need to be patient,” said Philip Shen, managing director and senior research analyst at Roth Capital Partners, adding that Enphase stock “could be a stock to watch” for investors looking for solar stocks that can give them exposure to data centers.
How the technology works
The IQ SST is designed to convert medium voltage AC power directly to 800V DC in a single conversion stage, scaling from 1.25 MW to 5 MW per skid.
The company says this single-phase conversion enables sub-millisecond response times to accommodate dynamic AI training loads, which can switch from idle to full power multiple times per second.
The power module technology is based on Enphase’s existing microinverter technology. Each module contains one of the company’s fifth-generation 22 nanometer control ASICs, called ‘Kestrel’, in addition to bidirectional gallium nitride (GaN) power switching technology.
Enphase expects the system to deliver 98.5% peak efficiency and 99.999% availability. This reliability metric relies on built-in distributed redundancy, which allows the system to continue operating even when only 90% of the power modules are participating.
The modular design also allows for hot-swapping, meaning units can be serviced or replaced without having to completely shut down the system. Enphase says the system is built with 10% redundancy to enable this hot-swapping capability.
Enphase said its engineers have built functioning examples of the power modules and it plans to conduct full system demonstrations later this year, with customer pilots in 2027 and volume shipments in 2028.
During the earnings call, Kothandaraman said he expects the addressable market for the IQ SST to reach 11 GW by 2031.
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