ChargePoint and Eaton used ACT Expo 2026 in Las Vegas to unveil the Express Solo, a 600 kW standalone DC fast charger that the companies say is the highest-output single-unit charger available today. The product arrives from a partnership built around a straightforward observation: charging hardware has been getting faster, but the grid infrastructure needed to support it has not kept pace. ChargePoint brings the charging software and hardware expertise; Eaton, a global power distribution company, covers the switchgear, transformers, and site-level power management that actually delivers electricity to the charger in the first place. Armin Von Czarnowski of Munro Live spoke with Sai Murahari from Eaton and Eduardo Guraieb from ChargePoint about how the product works and what operators should expect when they try to deploy it.
Six hundred kilowatts is a number that currently exceeds what any production EV in North America can accept. The fastest-charging vehicle available today, the Lucid Gravity, topped out at 400 kW during ChargePoint's own testing. The Express Solo's ceiling matters less as a present-day spec and more as a buffer for the next wave of vehicles: battery platforms are growing in both capacity and peak charge rate, and infrastructure installed today needs to serve cars that will arrive in three to five years. For context, Tesla's V4 Superchargers top out at 250 kW per stall, and many fleet operators have been waiting for hardware that can handle higher-capacity commercial vehicles alongside passenger cars. The Express Solo can divide its 600 kW across up to four ports simultaneously using a connected dispenser, averaging 150 kW per port with the flexibility to push more power to any single vehicle that can take it. Battery storage can be integrated directly through the unit's DC bus architecture, eliminating the need for a separate AC inverter and reducing both cost and physical footprint on site.
The honest catch is the grid. Murahari was direct about it: 99% of existing commercial sites do not have enough utility capacity to run this unit without a transformer upgrade and likely a new switchboard. That is the problem the partnership is designed to address by offering a single vendor relationship across both charging hardware and power distribution. The unit uses liquid cooling to manage heat at 600 kW output, with flood-rated vents positioned at the top of the housing. Anti-theft protection combines cut-resistant cables with a site-wide alarm system called ChargePoint Protect: if any cable on a site is cut, all units on that site simultaneously sound an alarm and alert authorities. A prefabricated four-port hub skid, with the charger, dispenser, and switchboard pre-wired at the factory, is also in development for operators who want a simpler installation path. Deployments are expected before the end of 2026, starting with ChargePoint's own headquarters.
Bottom line: The Express Solo is genuinely impressive hardware, but the charger itself is the easy part. Eaton and ChargePoint are selling something harder: the ability to navigate the power distribution upgrade, the utility coordination, and the site permitting that any 600 kW installation actually requires. For large multi-site operators like retailers and fuel station chains, a single vendor who can handle all of it is a real value proposition. For smaller operators, the grid upgrade cost is the conversation that needs to happen before any equipment gets ordered.