Nvidia announce Liquid-Cooled A100 and H100 GPUs

Nvidia has revealed that it is to launch liquid-cooled versions of their high-end PCIe accelerator cards. As an alternative to the traditional dual-slot air cooled cards, these liquid-cooled cards will be available in a more compact single-slot form factor, for both improved cooling and density.

While liquid cooling is far from new in the datacentre, it has typically been reserved for more bespoke hardware with extreme cooling and/or density requirements, such as the upcoming generation of high-end Nvidia H100 (SMX) servers.

PCIe servers, by contrast, are all about standardisation and compatibility. Which for server video cards/accelerators, means dual slot cards designed for use with forced air cooling within a server chassis. This serves the market segment well, however the 300 to 350 Watt TDPs of these cards means that they can’t get any thinner and still be effectively cooled by air. This therefore limits standard rackmount systems to 4 cards.

Nvidia will be releasing liquid-cooled versions of their A100 and H100 PCIe cards in order to give datacentre customers an easy and officially supported path to installing liquid-cooled PCIe accelerators within their facilities.

The liquid-cooled A100 will be available in Q3 and the liquid-cooled H100 will be available early next year 2023.

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