HPE booked its first order for the AMD Helios AI rack, and the buyer is Vultr. The headline number is $1.2 billion. The line that matters is the network inside the rack.
- Each rack holds 72 AMD Instinct MI455X GPUs, AMD EPYC Venice CPUs, AMD Pensando Vulcano NICs and the ROCm software stack.
- Six HPE Juniper QFX5252 switch trays connect all 72 GPUs over Ethernet, using the UALink over Ethernet standard.
- That puts HPE switches inside the scale-up domain, the GPU-to-GPU fabric Nvidia holds with NVLink.
- An open Ethernet fabric lets buyers split compute, fabric and cooling into separate line items.
- HPE raised its data center networking outlook the same day and lifted its Juniper cost-savings target to $800 million.
Read the full analysis. Vultr’s $1.2 billion bet is Ethernet inside the GPU rack.
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