At the ACT 2026 show, ABB E-mobility used its booth to reframe what a fast charger even is. Instead of one more box that charges a car, the company walked Out of Spec Reviews host Kyle through three connected product families: the all-in-one A series, the modular M series, and the expandable, liquid cooled X series. The pitch, as the video lays it out, is that a charging site should be sized to how it will actually be used, not to a peak number on a spec sheet. ABB says its distributed hardware can scale from a single 400 kW cabinet up past the megawatt level by stacking units and routing power where it is needed, with the same experience screen bolted onto very different power gear behind it.
What is new here is less any single charger and more the architecture tying them together. ABB separates the power electronics from the screen and payment hardware, so the same cabinet can run as a self-contained unit or feed power to remote charge posts. That distributed approach is the direction much of the heavy-duty charging world has been moving, as fleets and truck stops try to avoid paying for conversion capacity that sits idle most of the day. For a fleet operator, that is the real buyer question: a yard that only ever draws a third of its installed power is money spent on hardware that never earns its keep. ABB's answer, described in the video, is a power distribution unit that can send a cabinet's full output to a single stall or split it across many outputs, so one site can serve both rare peak sessions and steady daily throughput. To match hardware to demand, ABB also showed an internal configurator that starts from a customer's use case and works backward to the products a site actually needs.
On the technical side, the video reports that the A400 all-in-one is gaining liquid cooled cables, with ABB targeting units in the ground by the fourth quarter of this year, and that its air cooled cable already reaches 600 amps on CCS2 using a design that pulls heat from the connector pins. ABB says the A400 is already being deployed in North America, including at Walmart, and that its truck-focused MCS dispenser has been renamed Ultra as part of the new lineup. Kyle and ABB's Johan spend much of the tour on the X series, which ABB says is built for roughly 80 percent continuous utilization and is sealed to an IP65 rating with the cooling moved to a redundant unit on top. It uses a DC bus, so extra cabinets, battery storage, or solar can tie in directly and remove a conversion step that Johan estimates costs about 5 percent in round-trip efficiency. For split systems feeding remote posts, Johan argues 600 amps no longer cuts it and 800 amps is the target, with today's real limit being the certified cable and the metering rather than the power modules themselves. The video also frames why those currents are arriving at all: Johan points to Chinese battery makers, which he says supply a large share of the world's EV cells, pushing charge rates that were not realistic a few years ago, and to demonstrations in China running close to 1,000 amps on very high-voltage packs.
Bottom line: The interesting shift here is philosophical, not just electrical. ABB is telling site operators to stop buying chargers by peak wattage and start buying for utilization, which is the honest way to lower cost per kilowatt hour even if it makes the spec sheet look less heroic. If you run a depot or a corridor site, the modular and distributed pieces are worth a hard look, because idle conversion capacity is the quiet line item that wrecks charging economics. The megawatt headline is fun. The power distribution unit is the part that actually pays for itself.
Commentary on a third-party video. Figures and claims are as presented in the source and have not been independently verified. Spotted an error? Tell us and we will correct it.