ABB has entered into an agreement to acquire IPEC, a UK technology company with more than 30 years’ experience in electrical diagnostics.
Through the acquisition, ABB is targeting earlier warnings of failures in high-dependency sites such as utilities, airports and hospitals. It has particularly highlighted IPEC’s experience with data centres as a key reason behind its purchase.
At the centre of the deal is IPEC’s focus on continuous monitoring for partial discharge – the small electrical sparks that can indicate early-stage insulation degradation in medium- and high-voltage assets. ABB said partial discharge is the leading cause of insulation failure and is responsible for more than 80% of asset breakdowns before an unexpected outage.
Stuart Thompson, Division President, ABB Electrification Service, noted, “Across critical industries, the cost of downtime is staggering, from multi-million-dollar revenue losses in data centres to the safety and reliability risks facing utilities and hospitals. This acquisition gives our customers the diagnostic intelligence they need to prevent failures before they happen. By turning complex monitoring data into clear, actionable insights, we’re enabling businesses to shift from reactive repairs to predictive maintenance, so they can focus on performance while their critical infrastructure runs leaner, cleaner, and smarter.”
Data centres have been identified as a core market for ABB with this acquisition, and it’s easy to see why given the sector is rapidly growing here in the UK and abroad. While it’s long been a player in the data centre power market, it believes it can further strengthen its offering using IPEC’s expertise.
For data centres in particular, the pitch is straightforward: unplanned electrical faults can cascade quickly into service disruption, while planned maintenance windows are increasingly hard to come by as sites run hotter, fuller and closer to the edge. ABB said the acquisition will sit within its Electrification Service portfolio, helping customers move from reactive fixes to more proactive asset management.
IPEC is headquartered in Manchester and employs around 70 people, with operations in Oxford as well as Abu Dhabi, Sweden, Riyadh and Texas. The company has historically served utilities and industrial customers, but data centres now represent its largest and fastest-growing market segment – particularly in the US.
ABB said IPEC’s monitoring platforms provide 24/7 oversight of electrical infrastructure, with a flagship system capable of tracking up to 128 connection points simultaneously. IPEC then analyses the data using its proprietary DeCIFer algorithm to flag emerging issues before they escalate into failures, allowing operators to schedule maintenance proactively rather than respond after the fact.
That emphasis on early warning is likely to resonate with operators under pressure to protect uptime while also extending asset life. Even where redundancy exists, insulation failures in switchgear, transformers and cable terminations can create complex outages that are expensive to diagnose and disruptive to fix – particularly when capacity is tight and the consequences of taking equipment offline are amplified.
ABB said the deal will complement its broader predictive maintenance and service offering, which it claims can reduce downtime by up to 90% and cut maintenance costs by up to 85%. As always, those savings will depend on the starting condition of the assets and the maturity of a site’s maintenance regime – but the industry has long been clear: more instrumentation, more analytics, and fewer surprises.
Dr. Colin Smith, Managing Director of IPEC, commented, “At IPEC, we’ve spent decades refining how partial discharge data can be translated into meaningful diagnostics through advanced algorithms and, more recently, AI and machine learning. By joining ABB, we can both continue to develop our technology and bring our innovations to more industries and markets, turning complex data into predictive insight that anticipates potential failures and enables industries to make more strategic, intelligent decisions about their electrical assets.”
The acquisition is expected to close in the first quarter of 2026, although ABB did not disclose financial terms
