Or 1300 horsepower

That's just a rough conversion for 1 megawatt. I was curious about the actual voltage and current they were using, since the article didn't say much.

The values posted above cannot be far from the real values.

Perhaps they use something like 700 A at 1400 V.

It is unlikely that they use a voltage over 1500 V, because the semiconductor switches used in the converter become much more expensive at higher voltages. A current of 700 A or even 1000 A can be easily handled by a single IGBT module. There are much bigger semiconductor switches that can handle several thousand ampere currents.

I should have been clearer, I did a web search and found other articles, which based on marketing information from the company, say it's 1000A and 1000V.

https://electrek.co/2025/03/17/byd-confirms-1000v-super-e-pl...

What kind of wires do you need to handle that power?

Reminds me of this picture:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/cc/CERN-cab...

The cable is cooled by a mix of water and glycol, which runs through the cable and also cools the connector pins. Tesla use this in their supercharger cables, as without it the cable would be too heavy.

https://www.cpcworldwide.com/Liquid-Cooling/Electric-Vehicle...

At 1000V, 1000A require 0.13cm wire diameter[0] over 2 Meter with 5V voltage drop, just 15 AWG.

[0] https://www.omnicalculator.com/physics/amp-to-wire-size

A 5V drop at 1000 Amps also means 5000 Watts of heat generated, you probably want something with less of a drop.

There will be free hot showers, electrically heated Brazilian-style.

Yeah that turns the cable into a 5kW space heater.