Meta Helios Rack at OCP Summit 2025
Across from the AMD rack, there was Meta’s flavor. The huge Rittal rack was very different. You can see the top management switch is quite different as well as the optical panel below it.
One of the biggest differences is that instead of having power on the top is that Meta is putting Ethernet switches on the top. That is four 64-port switches.
This might seem trivial, but it means that Meta’s rack is quite a bit different from AMD’s. Sometimes when we see the hyper-scale customized rack there are small changes. This is a huge one.
Moving the network inside the rack also means that power has to move out. We will show more on that when we get to the rear of the rack, but this also gives a good sense of how wide these racks are since we have switches side-by-side here.
Below those switches we get the compute trays. Something to note here is that in the AMD rack we saw a lot of multi-mode fiber while here we see more DACs.
Meta also has switch trays that look a bit different.
Looking at these side-by-side the handle design is different, also we get some of the management ports on the right side instead of the left.
On the bottom, we have more compute trays, notably with what appeared to be a similar mix of E1.S SSDs.
On the bottom, we have more switches.
Moving to the rear, you can see the rear of the switches and the top of the cable cartridges.
Here are those cartridges.
Down below, we can see a key difference. That connector in the center is for the horizontal bus bar that powers Meta’s rack from a sidecar power rack. Meta needs to get a lot of power into this rack’s center busbar, and this is a connector to do that.
In the above photo of the top of the rack you may not have been able to see it due to the reflection, but there is a top horizontal power busbar connection point as well.
Meta’s Helios rack is quite different from AMD’s even if the wide rack and compute and switch sandwitch in the center is similar to AMD’s.
Final Words
AMD has a deal with OpenAI for the MI400 series. It announced a 50,000 GPU deal with Oracle. Furthermore, Meta has a custom rack that at first glance might look similar to AMD’s Helios rack, but the swapping of power and scale-out networking in the rack is very different.
What is clear is that the AMD Helios AI rack has convinced a number of large AI shops to invest in the solution.
Normally, smartphone photos are all you need, but for these, you could really have used a polarizing filter to cut down on reflections in the glass.
Totally agreed, just had the light bag with me that day instead of the 45lb camera backpack.