It’s Only Common Sense: How AI Consumes the Electronics Supply Chain
Dan’s Biz Bookshelf: ‘Building a Story Brand 2.0’
Marcy’s Musings: A World of Difference
Marel Power Solutions, Inc. announced that it has been awarded $1.9 million through the Michigan Supplier Conversion Grant Program, administered by the Michigan Department of Labor and Economic Opportunity (LEO). Marel is one of eleven Michigan automotive suppliers selected to share $21 million in funding aimed at strengthening the state's domestic automotive supply chain and preparing manufacturers for future vehicle technologies.
Marel Power develops power stacks, the building blocks inside every inverter and converter that moves energy between AC and DC, including electric vehicle traction inverters, battery disconnect units, onboard chargers, and charging infrastructure. It is a configurable platform rather than a component. The innovation is in how densely Marel Power packages power semiconductors and how aggressively it cools them. The platform is being deployed first in electric vehicles, and the same architecture extends to Defense and Data Center power systems.
"Power is the constraint on growth now," said Amrit Vivekanand, CEO of Marel Power Solutions. "Customers need more power in less space, at lower weight, and lower cost. Marel can deliver the same power in roughly one-quarter of the space at 30% lower cost. This LEO funding gives us the equipment to build our power stacks at pilot scale here in Michigan. Because our platform is configurable and scalable, customers can select the configuration they need instead of paying for a new design from the ground up."
The program is supported by the U.S. Department of Energy's Domestic Automotive Manufacturing Conversion Grant program, which is intended to increase domestic manufacturing capacity for qualified vehicles and their components while helping established automotive suppliers adapt to changes in the industry.
The same demand for higher power density is accelerating across Data Center and AI infrastructure, where rapidly increasing compute requirements are driving more power through increasingly constrained physical footprints. Marel's compact, high-density power electronics architecture is designed to help power conversion systems deliver significantly more power within the same (or smaller) space, supporting the next generation of AI and data center infrastructure.
"AI is changing the power-density requirements of the data center," said Vivekanand. "The challenge is no longer simply delivering more power, it is delivering dramatically more power without requiring dramatically more space. That is exactly where Marel's technology provides an advantage. By shrinking the power electronics footprint, we can help infrastructure providers use valuable space for compute instead of power conversion."
For Marel Power, the award funds equipment for a pilot production line in Plymouth, beginning with electric vehicle applications.
