C.<p>I saw an article today that was talking about some cloud <a href="https://mindly.social/tags/hyperscaler" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>hyperscaler</span></a> - Google, I think - switching to a high-voltage DC power system in anticipation of supporting <a href="https://mindly.social/tags/racks" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>racks</span></a> with a power density of 1 MW.</p><p>A <a href="https://mindly.social/tags/megawatt" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>megawatt</span></a>, in a standard rack? I know Nvidia's selling GPU racks at 120 kW, which is much more than a traditional rack can handle, and there's talk about 250 kW, but this is 4 times more than even that. It seems ... impractical.</p><p>Doing a few calculations - a 42U standard rack is 600mm wide, a meter deep, and 2 meters high, for a total volume of 1.2 m^3. If that was a solid block of mild steel, it would mass ~9500 kg. In round terms, 1MW input would be able to raise the temperature of that almost-ten-tonne steel block from the freezing point of water to the boiling point of water... in one second flat.</p><p>The cooling requirements for a system like this would be prolific, but I think it would require some never-seen-in-computing changes as well, like a "thermal crowbar". Just as a crowbar circuit shorts the power to cause a breaker to trip when some failure condition is detected, you would need something to immediately kill power to such a rack if the cooling system was impaired at all. You don't have time for this to take ten seconds!</p><p>They're also talking about it being an 800VDC system, so you need 1250A. For that, you would need a copper busbar with a cross-sectional area of more than 500 mm^2...</p><p>This doesn't smell right.</p><p><a href="https://mindly.social/tags/electronics" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>electronics</span></a> <a href="https://mindly.social/tags/electricity" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>electricity</span></a> <a href="https://mindly.social/tags/power" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>power</span></a> <a href="https://mindly.social/tags/datacenter" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>datacenter</span></a></p>