Chris Butler

Overview

Chris Butler leads Flex's embedded and critical power business. At OCP Global Summit 2025, he co-presented with Rob Campbell on rearchitecting data centers for the convergence of power and compute. Butler presented the visionary 2030 "Next Gen" architecture in which a solid-state transformer brings medium voltage directly into the data hall and converts it to 400 or 800 V DC without a separate electrical room voltage step-down chain — yielding a 27% efficiency gain, $330k annual energy savings per 1 MW deployment, and 90% space savings. He argued that solving AI data center infrastructure challenges requires breaking down organizational walls between power and IT teams and initiating cross-functional collaboration from the beginning of the design process, not after decisions are locked in.