Ayar Labs taps Wiwynn to cram 1,024 GPUs into a photonic rack system

Exclusive If you thought Nvidia or AMD's 72-GPU rack systems were enormous, silicon Ayar Labs has something much bigger in the works.

On Wednesday, the silicon photonics startup revealed it was working with ODM partner Wywinn to develop a new rack-scale reference platform capable of stitching more than 1,024 GPUs into a single unified system.

More importantly for datacenter operators, the optical interconnects used to connect these GPUs together won't require powering and cooling 600+ kilowatt racks to do it.

Instead, the reference design is expected to pull somewhere between 100 and 200 kilowatts per rack, putting them in line with contemporary rack systems. To reach their 1,024 accelerator target, the duo will simply add more racks, something that's not possible today using the copper interconnects found in AMD and Nvidia's latest system.

"Looking at the current racks, you're forced to have everything ...