Data Center Dynamics reports on gallium nitride (GaN) semiconductor adoption in data center power delivery systems.

"I would say 2026/27 will really be when we see GaN ramp into mass production," says Antoine Jalabert, vice president of the GaN division at semiconductor supplier Onsemi. "When you look at Nvidia's roadmap, there's no other way than to use GaN that will allow you to reach those kinds of power densities."

Gallium Nitride, or GaN, is a wide-bandgap semiconductor material composed of gallium—a soft, silvery metal used predominantly in electronics—and nitrogen. It dissipates far less energy as heat during power conversion than materials like silicon or silicon carbide, because its electrons move faster. "Wide bandgap materials have lower losses, which simply means that when they switch on and off, they dissipate less heat, allowing us to bring them to higher frequency," Jalabert explains. "When you have a system that works at a higher frequency, especially in switch-mode power supplies, the smaller that system can be."

Scientists have understood GaN since the early 1930s, but the first GaN-based transistors were not developed until the mid-1990s. Today, GaN transistors are found primarily in chargers for phones and electric vehicles. However, the explosive growth in server power demands is now driving adoption in data centers, where GaN promises superior efficiency, durability, and switching speed compared to silicon.

Despite these known advantages, GaN adoption in data centers has been surprisingly slow. "The world has been expecting GaN to ramp into the server and telecom space since we started talking about this technology around 10 to 15 years ago," Jalabert notes. "Why? Because that is where you really need power density. And did it? No. Instead, it ramped somewhere nobody was looking: in charging adapters."

Onsemi, founded in 1999 as a spinoff from Motorola's Semiconductor Components Group, introduced its vertical GaN (vGaN) semiconductor in October 2025. Unlike traditional lateral GaN, which is built on silicon or sapphire substrates, vertical GaN uses a 3D structure that conducts electricity vertically through the substrate itself. This architecture allows current to flow through the chip rather than across its surface, enabling higher voltage capacity without increasing the device's physical footprint.

Onsemi's "GaN-on-GaN" design is being manufactured at the company's fabrication plant in Syracuse, New York, though mass production is still approximately a year away. The technology can handle more than 1,200 volts and is designed to increase power density for 800V DC-DC converters in AI data centers. In December 2025, Onsemi partnered with GlobalFoundries to develop lateral GaN devices starting at 650 volts, the upper limit of what is currently available commercially.

Within the data center stack, GaN will not replace entire servers or all silicon and silicon carbide components, but rather specific transistors and electronic components in power supply units. "With AI, for example, where we see value with GaN, it's with what we call the high voltage primary side intermediate bus converter," Jalabert explains. Nvidia's 2027 transition to 800-volt direct current rack systems and power architectures supporting 1MW racks and beyond will create the demand Jalabert describes. GaN will play a critical role in primary side conversion within power supply units, converting the input direct current to 6V, 12V, and 48V lines. While lower voltage stages—below 40V—remain cost-effective with silicon, achieving Nvidia's 1MW rack targets requires GaN.

Vertical Semiconductor, another startup pursuing vGaN for data centers, was founded in 2024 as an MIT spinout based on research by the university's Palacios Group, a world-leading GaN research laboratory. In October 2025, the company raised $11 million to support development of vertical GaN transistors for applications ranging from 100 volts to 1.2 kilowatts.

Co-founder and CEO Cynthia Liao, who does not have a power electronics background but connected with co-founders Josh Perozek and Tomas Palacios through an MIT MBA program, saw a critical gap in the market. "The more we dug into those challenges, the more we realized that vertical GaN is very uniquely suited to solving a lot of those problems at once," she says. A decade of MIT research not only proved vGaN's compelling performance but also demonstrated that the technology could be manufactured at wafer scale using a fabless model.

Vertical Semiconductor differentiates itself through a fully CMOS-compatible manufacturing approach. Following its 2025 fundraising, the startup demonstrated production on eight-inch wafers using standard silicon CMOS manufacturing methods. "We made these vertical GaN devices in a CMOS fab using silicon tools, and not even state-of-the-art silicon tools, demonstrating that we can not only make this technology highly performant, but also very cost-effective and scalable," Liao explains. "We are able to go to market in any CMOS toolset—both 200mm, which we're focused on right now, and in the future for 300mm—and leveraging somewhat dated 200mm tools to make state-of-the-art technology is an incredible way to truly scale." Vertical has added design features that improve manufacturability, with even early prototypes showing performance gains. The company is now scaling production with a commercial foundry partner.

GaN's ascent does face headwinds. Gallium does not occur naturally in pure form; it is primarily extracted as a trace byproduct during industrial processing of bauxite for aluminum and zinc ores. The United States has not mined gallium domestically since 1987. Although China briefly lifted its ban on gallium exports to the US for a 12-month period beginning November 2025, the country currently accounts for 99...

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