800VDC Power Rack in the Wiwynn Booth
Also in the booth, there was an 800VDC power rack.
Here is the front and rear of the rack. Since there were a ton of folks in the booth, it was rough for Ada just to get full rack photos. At first, this might look like a rack of servers, or an AI compute rack. That is close, or it is installed close, but this is actually a power rack.
In several next-generation designs, the power supplies transition from being shelves inside the compute racks to their own racks. The reason this is called a power rack is that it is exactly what it is: all power. There are a few different configurations of these, and surely we are going to see more in the future. We have seen designs with all power supplies, batteries, and other components in these racks. In current power shelves, we sometimes see narrow power supplies with fans that can be hot-swapped. It looks like wider form factors are on the way.
Moving to the rear, here is what these look like.
At first I thought that these were just dummy shelves, but they even had the whip power connectors as well as inputs and outputs for management networking.
Eventually, the vision is that the power rack handles all in-rack power conversion, so those components are not inside the compute rack. This is important because it leaves more room for the in-rack copper communication domain between accelerators. Last year, we started showing how this was happening in phases, such as removing fans from compute racks because liquid-cooling leaves more room for connectivity. The next step is for the power to move out of the rack. There are then connectors between the power rack and the rack(s) they are servicing.
When we talk about the impact of a liquid-cooled 800VDC busbar, this is a great example of why. As leading-edge AI designs have moved fans and power supplies outside of each server, and now even the racks, having a slimmer busbar at the rear of the racks is another important optimization.
Final Words
Perhaps the most interesting part about this is just that we are not only moving to 800V DC to power next-generation racks. Instead, it might be that the industry is also going to run liquid around that busbar to cool it. After years of learning that running liquids around electronics is a bad idea because electricity and water do not mix, the industry is actually doing this.
The Wiwynn booth is always one of my favorites to visit at Computex because there is always something neat to see in it. As the data center build-out has gone into full force, this company that few knew when we did our “The $5B Server Vendor You Probably Have Never Heard Of Wiwynn” piece now has a huge booth at the show.
