Who Acme is
Acme Electronics (8121.TW) has, since 1991, run two materials businesses: soft ferrite cores and silicon carbide. Ferrite is the cash cow — a Taiwan leader in the upstream material that winding houses turn into inductors and transformers for power modules. More than 50 material grades are on the books, customised rather than catalogue. SiC, aluminium nitride and sapphire are the newer bets, funded by that ferrite cash flow.
It is not on NVIDIA's list. It earns a place here because both legs of the materials business have an 800V disclosure of their own: ferrite cores already shipping into HVDC 800V power, and N-type SiC powder in sampling for AI-server 800V PSUs.
Business mix
- Soft ferrite cores — noise filtering, EMI suppression, current stability. Sold to winding houses, then into PCs, general and AI servers, data centers, games consoles, comms equipment, automotive electronics and renewables. Utilisation around 90% on AI demand. This is not a volume-chasing business; the stated aim is higher-spec, higher-ASP grades.
- SiC and new materials — about 16–18% of sales. N-type (conductive) powder is feedstock for power-semiconductor crystal growth, aimed at EVs, renewable inverters and AI-server HVDC 800V power supplies, currently in sampling. Semi-insulating SiC is a different product: high-voltage RF (including 6G), with further work on AR/VR lens modules and SiC carriers for advanced packaging. Sintered SiC goes into semiconductor-tool parts such as etch focus rings and MOCVD platens. The company also has AlN and sapphire process capability.
N-type powder capacity is 20 tonnes a year and the build-out is done. Semi-insulating capacity is 1 tonne a year and still being added. SiC utilisation is about 50–60%.
Ferrite customers are spread globally, with Taiwan names a large slice. New-materials customers are global, and the SiC commercial stance is to lock onto non-China accounts and compete on purity rather than on Chinese spot prices.
Where it sits in the NVIDIA 800 VDC stack
Two legs of the magnetic / SiC materials slot, not the same product.
Ferrite is already inside HVDC 800V power supplies. Magnetics sit in every conversion stage; AI-server grades are specified more tightly than commodity cores, and the ASP and margin are better even when the visible difference is small.
N-type SiC powder is one layer further upstream than the MOSFET. It is crystal-growth feedstock for power devices that would switch in an 800V PSU, and it is in sampling, not a shipping PSU line. Semi-insulating SiC and AlN are not the 800V PSU story — they are RF, packaging and equipment materials.
Management has said both business units have product in data-center HVDC architectures. That is a materials claim, not a rack claim, and the AI-data-center share of sales is not a number the company can pin down, because customers do not always name the end use.
Strategy
Keep ferrite as the cash engine and walk it up the AI spec; put growth capex into semi-insulating SiC and AlN, and consider stepping downstream into bulk, sheet forming and light machining if customers ask. No capital raise or bond issue is planned unless a large project appears.