Taking the Data Center to the Next Level

NVIDIA’s Vera Rubin Compute Tray streamlines liquid-cooled data center implementation.
Oct. 16, 2025
2 min read

What you'll learn:

  • What’s in the Vera Rubin Compute Tray?
  • What changes are coming to Open Compute architectures?

The GB300 Compute Tray (Fig. 1) developed by NVIDIA pushed the envelope in the past with a liquid-cooled solution to support its Blackwell platform designed for rack-scale data centers. One might think a few racks of these in a supercomputer configuration would be enough for most data centers, but no such luck.

AI growth seems to have an insatiable need for more compute power, and putting it into a more compact form means more efficient cooling. The GB300 is compatible with the Open Compute Project’s (OCP) MGX Accelerated Computing rack and tray specifications.

Introducing the Vera Rubin Compute Tray

The latest incarnation is the Vera Rubin Compute Tray (Fig. 2) that hosts the Rubin CPX GPU. The upgraded specification is being offered to OCP. A rack of these trays is designed to deliver 150 TB of memory running at 1.7 petabytes/s with a performance factor increase of 7.5 compared to the GB300. That’s 4X the memory and 3X the memory bandwidth.

The new tray is designed for production with the elimination of much of the individual electrical and liquid-cooling connections. A liquid-cooling manifold and PCB midplane sits at the center of the system with standard connections on both sides. Not only does this simplifies assembly, but it also allows better cooling and connectivity that’s more rugged as well.

The Vera Rubin NVL144 MGX rack design implements energy-efficient 45°C liquid cooling that features a 5,000-A liquid-cooled busbar and 20X the energy storage of the prior version. The system supports 100-A flexible whips and has a power-supply unit (PSU) with an automatic transfer switch for better system resilience.

Transitioning to 800-V DC Architecture

The upcoming Kyber Rack Server Generation should appear by 2027. It’s designed to handle 576 NVIDIA Rubin Ultra GPUs with a very important difference: It’s moving from 415 or 480 V AC to the 800 V DC. Yes, that’s right, 800 V DC.

The switch to 800 V DC should allow power supplies to deliver 150% more power. In theory, it eliminates the need for the 200-kg copper busbars currently needed to feed a single rack.

Open Compute Project
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Check out technology on display at the Open Compute Project summit.

About the Author

William G. Wong

Senior Content Director - Electronic Design and Microwaves & RF

I am Editor of Electronic Design focusing on embedded, software, and systems. As Senior Content Director, I also manage Microwaves & RF and I work with a great team of editors to provide engineers, programmers, developers and technical managers with interesting and useful articles and videos on a regular basis. Check out our free newsletters to see the latest content.

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I earned a Bachelor of Electrical Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology and a Masters in Computer Science from Rutgers University. I still do a bit of programming using everything from C and C++ to Rust and Ada/SPARK. I do a bit of PHP programming for Drupal websites. I have posted a few Drupal modules.  

I still get a hand on software and electronic hardware. Some of this can be found on our Kit Close-Up video series. You can also see me on many of our TechXchange Talk videos. I am interested in a range of projects from robotics to artificial intelligence. 

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