The gpu shortage ended, the facilities shortage began. nvidia's infrastructure notes, updated…
the gpu shortage ended, the facilities shortage began. nvidia's infrastructure notes, updated september 7, say direct liquid cooling captures 98% of the heat in blackwell systems, so a hall built for 10kw racks needs a construction project before an ai project.
compute is plumbing again.
Context
Sources found on liquid cooling are not NVIDIA statements on a 98 percent figure. Supermicro's liquid cooling page claims up to 98 percent heat capture for its DLC-2 design, as a vendor snippet. IEEE Spectrum, 22 September 2026, in a CoolIT-based piece, says coldplates scale to 100 percent heat capture and that beyond 250 kW a rack cannot use a hybrid liquid-air approach. A third-party repost of an NVIDIA HGX physical requirements guide, dated 29 July 2026, says a 72-GPU Blackwell rack demands 120 to 140 kW per rack with mandatory liquid cooling.
NVIDIA infrastructure notes updated September 7 were not found, and the 98 percent for Blackwell appears only for Supermicro's own design and must not be attributed to NVIDIA. The 10 kW rack figure was not found; the repost's 120 to 140 kW is a different, secondary figure. The claim that the GPU shortage ended was not supported. Unsupported is not refuted. Liquid cooling and rack power are real constraints for Blackwell-class racks per secondary and vendor sources. Compute is plumbing again is the author's take.
Watch next
- NVIDIA's official data-center requirements page and its exact heat-capture wording.
Sources
- Liquid cooling (Supermicro)supermicro.com
- Fanless liquid-cooled AI servers (IEEE Spectrum, 22 Sep 2026)spectrum.ieee.org
- NVIDIA Blackwell architecturenvidia.com
Provenance
The note above is reproduced unedited from the original post, first published on Threads on 21 September 2026 at 02:01 IST. Sources are the papers and datasets the note draws on.
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