With demand for AI hardware and supporting equipment continuing to surge, the last couple of years have been especially good for server vendors worldwide as they help their customers get equipped. At the same time, however, these companies have not been resting on their laurels. New processors, shifting bottlenecks, and the recent explosion in agentic systems have been reshaping the kinds of server hardware needed. Fittingly, the Taiwanese server vendors have been using this year’s Computex trade show to demonstrate their latest and upcoming server wares. That includes showing off neat capabilities like diamond cooling AI GPUs.
While we were at the show, we spent some time at MiTAC’s booth. These days, MiTAC is one of Taiwan’s largest server vendors, thanks in part to the AI boom, but also with folding in its Tyan brand, and Intel’s server business.
Big Iron: AMD Instinct MI355X 52U Liquid Cooled Server Rack #
Currently, the big trend in server systems is big servers themselves, and MiTAC had a couple such projects to show off. First up was a complete AMD Instinct MI355X server rack.
This is a towering 52U rack that packs 12 of the company’s G4826Z5 AI servers, each with 8 AMD Instinct MI355X accelerators, for a grand total of 96 MI355X accelerators in a single rack.
Along with compute nodes for the accelerators themselves, the rack is also equipped with a full networking and coolant distribution system. MiTAC intends for the rack to be a turnkey product, allowing customers to receive it and get it up and running with a minimum amount of work.
On the networking side, Broadcom is supplying the backbone of the system with its Tomahawk 5 800Gbps Ethernet switches. Meanwhile, the CDU comes from Nidec, which supplies a unit capable of circulating enough coolant to move 200kW of heat.
According to MiTAC, the super-sized server is designed specifically to maximize density. Besides the use of liquid cooling, the taller stature of the server has allowed it to cram in a few more U’s worth of hardware. All told, the company promotes the 52U server rack as offering 50% more density per rack than “standard” AI configurations, which we interpret to mean air-cooled systems.
Here is a closer-up look at a single G4826Z5 server.
The 4U server rack contains two AMD EPYC 9xx5 processors alongside the aforementioned MI355X GPUs. The fast networking is in the rear, but the front has eight U.2 drive bays for local SSD storage.
The server is essentially split into two halves. The top houses the GPUs, while the bottom half houses the CPUs and most everything else.
48U HPC Liquid Cooled Rack #
For those who need a more CPU-focused HPC compute rack, MiTAC also had a 48U OCP-spec rack at the show. This was largely to show what a complete OCP ORv3-compliant rack from MiTAC could look like, built from the company’s compute and storage server hardware.
For compute servers, MiTAC installed its C2811Z5 2U AMD EPYC 9555 servers, which can accommodate up to 3TB of memory per node. Those are paired with the company’s LE2S01 “Lake Erie” storage servers, which are 2U SAS4 expander storage systems with 36 3.5-inch drive bays in 2OU for copious hard drive or solid state storage. You can see the disk shelf connection via external SFF-8674 on the front of those servers as well.
Meanwhile, no rack would be complete without power, cooling, and networking. MiTAC does not provide these parts themselves, but for their Computex example system, they had a Murata power shelf, as well as a sizable 250kW CDU from Nidec.
Along with their rack systems, MiTAC also had individual servers on display, which we looked at next, including diamond cooling for GPUs.