Photo of the day: AI system with NVIDIA GB200 and a huge heatsink for the Microsoft Azure cloud

Microsoft Corporation published on the social network X a photo of a new AI system based on NVIDIA GB200 accelerators for the Azure cloud platform. The computer rack is depicted next to the coolant distribution unit (CDU), which is part of the coolant system.

As the ServeTheHome resource notes, the computing rack contains eight GB200-based nodes with Blackwell architecture, as well as a number of other components. The exact configuration of the system is not disclosed.

The photo shows that the CDU unit, located on the right side of the computing rack, is twice as wide. It contains a large-sized liquid-air heat exchanger, which is essentially an analogue of a car radiator. You can see pumps, elements of the power subsystem, as well as monitoring equipment.

Image source: Microsoft

Observers note that typically two-rack-wide heat exchangers are designed for multiple compute racks. Therefore, it is possible that the products captured in the picture are part of a larger system, where the shown CDU unit will be responsible for cooling several computing racks with NVIDIA GB200 accelerators.

Let us remember that earlier Microsoft and NVIDIA had disagreements regarding the use of B200 solutions. NVIDIA insists that customers purchase these products as part of full-fledged server racks, while Microsoft wants to use the OCP rack option to unify the infrastructure of its many data centers. Recently it also became known that NVIDIA abandoned the release of two-rack GB200 NVL36×2 super accelerators in favor of single-rack versions NVL72 and NVL36. Moreover, Microsoft gave preference to NVL72: the corporation will begin receiving these systems in December.