Flex buys EPC Power for $4.4 bn as data centre supply chain consolidates

Flex agreed to acquire EPC Power in a $4.4 billion deal, per Reuters, with the explicit aim of expanding its data centre power product line. The announcement came as Vertiv said it would buy Utility Innovation Group for up to $2.6 billion in a parallel data centre push. Together, the two deals represent a swift consolidation wave among suppliers racing to meet surging compute load growth.

The infrastructure pressure is not confined to vendor supply chains. In Australia, outback gas producers are eyeing the Northern Territory as an alternative interconnection route, seeking to sidestep the power queue that has formed around data centre demand on the east coast grid. The dynamic mirrors grid-access bottlenecks already familiar to European analysts watching hyperscaler load growth strain transmission capacity in the German and Dutch zones.

Southern Company raised its capital spending plan by 7%, citing data centre demand as a primary driver, a signal that regulated utilities are also repricing their infrastructure build-out in response to the same load surge now driving M&A in the vendor tier.