The hardware behind the future


Flex Puts Rack Power in Its Own Cabinet With an 800 VDC Power Rack

Flex has announced an 800 VDC Power Rack built with NVIDIA for the Vera Rubin platform, moving power conversion out of the IT rack. The release carries no rack power rating, no efficiency figure, no price and no availability date.

Flex Puts Rack Power in Its Own Cabinet With an 800 VDC Power Rack

Flex has announced an 800 VDC Power Rack developed in collaboration with NVIDIA to support the NVIDIA Vera Rubin platform. The product sits in Flex's AI Infrastructure Platform portfolio and moves power conversion out of the IT rack and into a cabinet of its own.

That disaggregation is the whole design argument. In-row power racks take the shelves, backup units and conversion stages that would otherwise occupy rack units next to the GPUs and put them alongside instead, which returns that space to compute. Flex says the rack uses a power shelf built for the Vera Rubin platform and offers Battery Backup Units and Capacitor Backup Units as enhanced options for protection against outages and grid disturbances.

"Megawatt-scale AI workloads are redefining what's required from data center power infrastructure," said Chris Butler, President, Embedded and Critical Power, Flex. What that passes over is the shape of the deployment: the release gives no rack power rating, no efficiency figure, no dimensions and no weight, which are among the first numbers a facilities engineer needs before a rack can be sited.

One number is given, and it carries a condition worth reading twice. Flex says that when deployed with a future GPU platform, the architecture increases available compute power per rack from approximately 125 kW to up to 880 kW. The comparison is therefore against hardware that is not yet available, and the release names neither the current platform behind the 125 kW figure nor the future one behind the 880 kW figure.

Pricing and availability are absent too. There is no price, no order date and no shipping window, and the omission is a vendor choice rather than a wire-format constraint, because other vendors' releases on the same service carry that information when they have it. A Flex datasheet or a configured quote would settle it.

Buyers who want a comparison have one on the same architecture. Delta describes 800 VDC In-Row 660 kW Power Racks built from six 110 kW power shelves, each with an embedded 80 kW battery backup unit for 480 kW in total, and puts the energy efficiency of the supporting 18.5 kW AC to DC power supply units as high as 98 percent. Delta has published ratings that Flex has not, which says nothing about which product suits a given hall, and everything about which one can be evaluated on paper right now.

Manufacturing location is the other buyer-relevant detail Flex does supply. The company says the rack is backed by its global manufacturing and supply chain network and can be built in North America, giving customers the option to source in region.

Rack-level power delivery is becoming a procurement item in its own right rather than a line inside a colocation contract, and the vendor that publishes ratings first is the one that gets specified. Until Flex puts a power rating and a price against this rack, an engineer can compare its architecture with Delta's but not its capacity.

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