AI SERVERS AND HIGH-DENSITY COMPUTING

This book explores the hardware that makes modern AI possible. From the dense silicon of an NVIDIA H100 to the thundering cooling towers of a hyperscale data center, AI computing infrastructure is radically different from the servers that ran enterprise workloads a decade ago. Power densities have increased tenfold. Cooling has moved from air to liquid. Racks that once drew 5 kW now demand 100 kW or more.

We wrote this book for engineers, architects, data center operators, procurement teams, and technology leaders who need to understand not just what these systems do, but how they are designed, why they are built the way they are, and what challenges remain unsolved.

The chapters follow a logical arc: we begin with GPU hardware fundamentals, move through the distinction between training and inference workloads, explore rack and power design, examine cooling in depth, compare HPC clusters with traditional servers, and close with a view of how server architectures are evolving to meet demands that would have seemed impossible a few years ago.