Lenovo has announced new liquid-cooled AI hardware powered by Nvidia’s Blackwell GPUs.
At its Tech World ‘24 event in Seattle, Washington this week, the company announced the ThinkSystem N1380 Neptune Chassis and SC777 V4 Neptune server to host liquid-cooled Nvidia GPUs.
The company said the new hardware enables 100 percent heat removal so customers can run 100kW+ server racks without specialized air conditioning.
“For more than a decade, Lenovo has pioneered liquid cooling innovations, with the goal of bringing the power of high-performance computing to every organization,” said Lenovo chairman and CEO Yuanqing Yang. “Through groundbreaking liquid-cooling engineering and technology integration, ThinkSystem N1380 Neptune is unlocking a new era of data center efficiency and design that will help bring Nvidia Blackwell and trillion-parameter AI to all, while fundamentally changing how power is used in the data center.”
Scaling from a compact 13U enclosure to full racks, rows, and data centers, the ThinkSystem N1380 Neptune features eight tray slots, four 15kW power conversion stations, and a Neptune water flow distribution. The enclosure houses up to four ThinkSystem 15kW Titanium Power Conversion Stations (PCS), supplying internal system power to a 48V busbar.
The SC777 V4 integrates into a standard 19’’ rack cabinet with the ThinkSystem N1380 Neptune enclosure. The Nvidia GB200-based system features two Grace processors and four Blackwell GPUs in one vertical 21” compute tray. It is equipped with eight compute trays per 13U Enclosure (i.e. the N1380) for 19’’ rack cabinets, up to three enclosures per rack.
With up to three N1380 enclosures in a standard 19’’ rack cabinet, 24 trays, 48 processors, and 96 GPUs can fit into two 60x60 data center floor tiles.
With four PCS units supporting N+1 operation and 120 percent oversubscription, Lenovo said the total power capacity for the enclosure reaches 54kW DC. Given a 96 percent peak AC/DC conversion efficiency and an almost perfect Power Factor at 99 percent above 50 percent load, the total apparent power is 58 kVA. When you place three enclosures in a rack, you can achieve a total power density of 162kW DC or ~175kVA.
“The Nvidia Blackwell platform is the engine to power generative AI and define a new industrial revolution,” said Bob Pette, VP of enterprise platforms at Nvidia. “With the breakthrough capabilities of Lenovo ThinkSystem N1380 Neptune and Nvidia GB200, we’re supporting the world’s most technologically advanced accelerated workloads while massively reducing operation costs and energy consumption to help realize the promise of AI for every industry.”
