Yes that's one rack, there are a hundred of them in a room. And next gen racks will be 1MW each. Also 1.8MW thermal, that's less than a MW of electricity.
I know that modern cooling systems are much better than they were in the past, but I remember as a kid in the 70s using electric fires during winter (because they were too expensive to run unless absolutely required). A single 1KW bar on the fire would heat a room quite quickly, and you're talking about the equivalent heat from 1,800 of those 1KW bars in a single rack.
How big are these racks that you think will convert power to 1.8MW of heat?
This is false. I do this for a living. That would imply almost 24000W per rack unit. There are few if any servers on the market that will draw more than even 1/10th of that amount of power, and that is absolute peak power draw.
Servers don't draw more power generation to generation, they typically become more efficient at doing more work with the same or less power/space. Most colos won't give you more than 1000W of power budget, so larger servers wouldn't be useful.
For reference: At my old job, our largest datacenter drew maybe ~10kW during peak usage, and it provided emergency services for one of the largest counties in my state. It served over 60,000 people with left over capacity for more than 5x that. If we had equipment newer than 20yrs old (and a better architecture), it would've consumed a fraction of the power.
The date on the article is approximately 6 months ago, so their claim of 12 to 18 months means these racks should be with us by the end of the year. I'm sure that people working in data centres would already know about this stuff coming if the 12 to 18 months was anything other than marketing waffle to suck in early investors with large capital.
When they say they will require "robust liquid cooling systems", they're not kidding. I doubt they have the foggiest idea how the cooling engineers will work this out.
This article is nothing more than hype and speculation. I can't help but think you just googled an article that mentioned a 1MW rack after I pointed out that you are wrong. Real world systems have not ever had this level of density, and likely will not for another half century at the current pace of things.
The largest HPC cluster in the world uses 30MW and it consumes *87* racks (roughly .35MW of draw per rack). 1MW would still easily put you in the top ~30 fastest HPC systems in the world. I don't think you understand *how much* power 1MW actually is. The link you posted reads as glorified marketing copy, and even that refers to a hypothetical 1MW rack as *mythical*. A system that draws 1/10th of that would still be absurdly powerful.
I'm telling you from real world industry experience that you will never ever ever see a density of 1MW/rack in any real environment outside of *maybe* hyper-specialized one off deployments in 50 years or so.
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u/wintrmt3 Jan 08 '26
Yes that's one rack, there are a hundred of them in a room. And next gen racks will be 1MW each. Also 1.8MW thermal, that's less than a MW of electricity.