Silicon carbide lines stay sold out as EV and grid inverters compete for wafers

DURHAM, N.C. — The electric-vehicle slowdown did not free the silicon-carbide line. Grid-scale inverters and AI-campus power shelves absorbed the slack, and wafer suppliers said 2026 lots are still allocated.

Auto purchasing managers who expected to renegotiate from a position of weakness found data-center customers willing to take the wafers instead. That is a new kind of competition in a market that used to have one dominant end market.

The investment case for SiC has therefore split. It is no longer a pure EV-penetration story. It is a power-electronics story that happens to include cars, substations, and the unglamorous shelves that keep GPUs from brownout.