At NVIDIA GTC 2025, we saw a number of cool systems at the Gigabyte booth. The two headliners were the GIGAPOD and the NVL72 rack. The GIGAPOD integrates NVIDIA HGX platforms into a rack with liquid cooling for pre-configured dense racks. The NVIDIA GB300 NVL72 is, of course, the next-generation high-end rack.
For this, we have a quick short on the GigaPOD and GB300 nodes that you can find here:
As always, we suggest watching this in its own browser, tab, or window for the best viewing experience.
Gigabyte GIGAPOD
The idea behind the Gigabyte GIGAPOD is that the company is selling dense AI racks as complete solutions. What is a bit different is that Gigabyte is offering both liquid-cooled and air-cooled options.
The liquid-cooled model is the Gigabyte G4L3-SD1. Adding liquid cooling makes this model considerably different. Instead of tall heatisnks, we get coldplates and tubing.
The coldplates are by CoolIT and look very slick.
The demo model on the show floor was a NVIDIA HGX H200 board, but this can support the HGX B200 and HGX B300 as well. With the HGX H200, we see cooling blocks for the NVLink Switch setup as well.
The benefit of liquid cooling is power savings, and density. By using coldplates instead of heatsinks, the chassis height can be only 4U making this very dense.
Pulling the bottom CPU tray out, we can see the front I/O as well as the SSDs and DDR5 slots.
The Intel Xeon CPUs are liquid cooled with CoolIT coldplates as well.
Gigabyte also has the liquid cooling manifolds that go along with the systems and have the right number and size of connectors for this dense configuration.
If you want to learn more about liquid cooling, three years ago STH did a piece at CoolIT in Calgary:
Of course, that is the liquid-cooled model, but there was also an air-cooled version.
