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'AI Ambition is Pushing Copper To Its Breaking Point'


An anonymous reader shares a report: Datacenters have been trending toward denser, more power-hungry systems for years. In case you missed it, 19-inch racks are now pushing power demands beyond 120 kilowatts in high-density configurations, with many making the switch to direct liquid cooling to tame...

In case you missed it, 19-inch racks are now pushing power demands beyond 120 kilowatts in high-density configurations, with many making the switch to direct liquid cooling to tame the heat. To support these models, chip designers like Nvidia use extremely high-speed interconnects -- on the order of 1.8 terabytes a second -- to make eight or more GPUs look and behave like a single device. Earlier in 2024 at GTC, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said that if the company had used optics as opposed to copper to stitch together the 72 GPUs that make up its NVL72 rack systems, it would have required an additional 20 kilowatts of power.

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