Summary
- Legrand plans to integrate Karman into intelligent AC rack PDUs and DC power shelves for high-density data centres.
- Karman says its platform measures power at microsecond resolution and uses predictive controls to manage available power.
- Initial Karman-enabled Legrand products are expected in mid-2027, so the integration is not yet commercially deployed equipment.
Legrand plans to integrate Karman’s power monitoring and control platform into intelligent AC rack PDUs and DC power shelves for high-density data centres, with the first products expected in mid-2027.
Karman announced the partnership on 6 October. Legrand brands Raritan, Server Technology and ZPE Systems are expected to be the first product lines to incorporate the platform.
The products are therefore part of an announced roadmap rather than equipment available to operators today.
Karman says its platform measures power use at microsecond resolution and applies predictive controls to track available electrical headroom. The system is built on a customised Nvidia Jetson Orin Nano embedded within power infrastructure.
The companies say that more detailed visibility can allow operators to schedule additional compute within an existing provisioned power envelope. Their claim that customers can generate 50% or more additional AI tokens from the same provisioned power is a supplier performance claim, not an independently established result across operating data centres.
Provisioned power is not continuous load
Electrical infrastructure cannot be planned on the assumption that every server will draw exactly its average power at every moment. Processor demand changes with workload, while breakers, conductors, busways and power conversion equipment have limits that must not be exceeded during brief peaks.
Operators therefore retain headroom between the rated capacity of parts of the electrical system and the load they are prepared to schedule against them. That margin protects against coincident peaks, measurement uncertainty and changes in workload behaviour.
Karman is attempting to reduce some of that unused margin through faster measurement and predictive control. If the system can identify available capacity more precisely and anticipate demand over short intervals, additional workloads could be scheduled without increasing the nominal rating of the rack distribution equipment.
The platform does not create electricity or raise the thermal rating of cables, breakers or busways. Its engineering proposition is to give operators more information and control over how closely actual IT demand approaches an existing electrical limit.
Legrand intends to embed that capability within rack power products rather than rely only on a separate monitoring layer. Intelligent rack PDUs already measure and distribute power close to IT equipment, giving them a position from which measurements at high resolution can be associated with individual rack loads.
AI racks make brief peaks harder to ignore
GPU clusters make short variations more consequential because accelerator demand can change rapidly as workloads move through different phases. A rack with high average utilisation can still produce peaks that influence breaker settings, conductor sizing and the operating margin retained by the facility.
The effect becomes larger across a fleet of high-power racks. A small percentage of reserved capacity repeated across many racks can amount to a material quantity of electrical infrastructure that has been installed but is not continuously used.
Karman says measurements at microsecond resolution allow the system to build detailed power profiles and make predictions tied to instantaneous workload demand. Whether that produces the utilisation gains claimed by the suppliers will depend on prediction accuracy, control response, workload characteristics and the limits imposed elsewhere in the power chain.
Rack control cannot overcome a shortage at the utility connection, transformer or upstream switchgear. If those assets have reached their physical rating, software cannot add capacity to them.
It can change how closely rack demand is managed against a limit that already exists. In a constrained facility, that could influence how much compute is deployed before another electrical expansion becomes necessary, provided protection margins and upstream limits are preserved.
The planned integration covers both AC rack PDUs and DC power shelves. That gives the partnership relevance as manufacturers develop denser AI systems and examine DC distribution architectures intended to reduce conversion stages and support larger rack loads.
Legrand’s involvement moves Karman from a standalone control platform towards integration with established physical power products. The first meaningful test will come when the announced equipment reaches customers and operators can compare its behaviour with existing power management systems under live workloads.
The announcement does not identify a customer facility, pilot deployment or independently measured production result for the integrated products. Those details can only be assessed once the Legrand hardware reaches the market and is tested under operating data centre loads.
Until then, the partnership establishes a product roadmap rather than a verified increase in data centre capacity. The proposed benefit is narrower: more precise measurement and predictive control may allow operators to use more of an existing rack power envelope without changing the physical rating of the infrastructure that supplies it.
