AI's Physical Constraints: How AI Rewired the Data Center
This is Part I of a two-part series on the AI data center stack. Part II, The Data Layer for the AI Data Center, explains the operational data layer required once AI workloads couple compute, cooling, power, and facility systems.
For most of the cloud era, a server rack was a five to twenty kilowatt object. You could fill a room with them, move air across the front, and the building stayed an ordinary building. A single current AI rack, NVIDIA's GB300 NVL72, draws about 132 to 140 kilowatts, with the GPUs alone accounting for more than a hundred. That is close to an order of magnitude more power in the same floor space as those old racks, and it lands as heat in the same small volume. Past roughly a hundred kilowatts per rack, air stops being able to carry the heat out, and the rack has to...
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