Nvidia is gearing up to sell servers instead of just GPUs and components

Summary

The launch of Nvidia's Vera Rubin platform for AI and HPC next year could mark significant changes in the AI hardware supply chain as Nvidia plans to ship its partners fully assembled Level-10 (L10) VR200 compute trays with all compute hardware, cooling systems, and interfaces pre-installed, according to J.P. Morgan (via @Jukanlosreve). The move would leave major ODMs with very little design or integration work, making their lives easier, but would also trim their margins in favor of Nvidia's. The information remains unofficial at this stage.Starting with the VR200 platform, Nvidia is reportedly preparing to take over production of fully built L10 compute trays with a pre-installed Vera CPU, Rubin GPUs, and a cooling system instead of allowing hyperscalers and ODM partners to build their own motherboards and cooling solutions. This would not be the first time the company has supplied its partners with a partially integrated server sub-assembly: it did so with its GB200 platform when it supplied the whole Bianca board with key components pre-installed. However, at the time, this could be considered as L7 – L8 integration, whereas now the company is reportedly considering going all the way to L10, selling the whole tray assembly — including accelerators, CPU, memory, NICs, power-delivery hardware, midplane interfaces, and liquid-cooling cold plates — as a pre-built, tested module.If the information is correct, and Nvidia will indeed ship its partners L10 compute trays (which probably account for 90% of the cost of a server), then Nvidia will only leave its partners with rack-level integration rather than server design. They would still build the outer chassis, integrate power supplies depending on requirements, install sidecars or CDUs for rack-level cooling, add their own BMC and management stack, and perform final assembly and testing. These tasks matter operationally, but they do not differentiate hardware in a meaningful way.Image 1 of 2(Image credit: Nvidia/YouTu...