- Cooling prices surge as Nvidia pushes energy limits throughout successive rack generations
- Compute trays dominate bills on account of rising chilly plate necessities and thermal density
- Change tray financial savings can’t offset escalating calls for from high-power GPU trays
The price of retaining Nvidia’s high-end rack programs cool continues to climb as every era pushes deeper into excessive energy ranges.
A Morgan Stanley report obtained by @Jukanlosreve reveals the liquid cooling {hardware} contained in the GB300 NVL72 prices $49,860, roughly sufficient to purchase a brand new Tesla Mannequin Y.
The report additional estimates the liquid cooling system required for the newer Vera Rubin NVL144 configuration will method $55,710, a 17% enhance.
The economics of tray-level cooling
This platform depends upon hotter Rubin GPUs rated at as much as 1,800W per unit, together with next-generation NVSwitch 6.0 parts.
The price for cooling this technique is linked to the person compute trays, and every compute tray will want higher-capacity chilly plates.
The price per compute tray is anticipated to rise by 18% to about $2,660 – and because the Vera Rubin NVL144 system has 18 trays, the full compute-side cooling expense reaches roughly $47,880.
The rise comes from higher-capacity chilly plates, which climb to $400 per unit as CPUs and GPUs push thermal limits.
In the meantime, change tray cooling seems much less burdensome, falling to $870 per tray and totalling $7,830 per rack.
Nonetheless, this discount is overshadowed by the a lot bigger soar on the compute facet, as the associated fee trajectory follows a sample: the transition from GB200 NVL72 noticed a 20% rise in cooling calls for for GB300 NVL72.
Equally, the transfer from GB300 NVL72 to the Vera Rubin NVL144 provides one other 17%. The facility ranges clarify this development.
Every Blackwell Extremely information heart GPU attracts 1,400W, a Grace CPU takes 300W, and reminiscence contributes 200W per socket.
As workloads escalate, the worth of precision cooling grows simply as quick, however future programs will additional compound this. Nvidia plans a shift to Rubin Extremely GPUs that will attain a thermal design energy of three,600W per bundle, and assembly that requirement could drive new sorts of chilly plates or extra aggressive cooling methods.
Nvidia can also be getting ready the liquid-cooled NVL576 “Kyber” system, which is able to embody 144 GPU packages, and can ship increased efficiency than the Vera Rubin NVL144, whereas carrying a fair higher cooling invoice.
Though the ultimate greenback quantity shouldn’t be confirmed, high-capacity plates able to eradicating 3.6kW of warmth will clearly exceed the present $400 per unit.
This sends a sign that future information heart installations will face even steeper thermal bills.
By way of Toms {Hardware}
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