B300 and GB300 NVL72 Power and Cooling Requirements

A DGX B300 is a 10-rack-unit system drawing 14.5 kW, with twelve 3.2 kW power supplies, cooled by air at about 1,500 CFM. Our residual report puts the B300 GPU at 1,400 W, double the H100's 700 W.

Two DGX B300s fill a 30 kW rack; a typical 15 kW rack holds one. A cluster of 32 B300 servers needs 16 racks at 30 kW, against 8 at 80 kW. Liquid-cooled HGX B300 variants pack more servers per rack and require a facility water loop.

A GB300 NVL72 puts 72 GPUs and 36 Grace CPUs in one rack with one NVLink domain. GIGABYTE rates its rack at up to 140 kW. Lenovo's build is hybrid-cooled: cold plates fed by a coolant distribution unit on the CPUs, GPUs, NVLink switches and ConnectX-8 adapters, air for drives, optics and power distribution.

Past roughly 40 kW per rack, air cooling stops working. A GB300 site needs liquid cooling, the grid capacity, reinforced floors and plumbing in place before the racks arrive. GB200 NVL72 racks, at about 120 kW, set the same bar a year earlier, and early racks were reported to overheat while NVIDIA revised designs.

Density decides the buyer pool. Only a small set of purpose-built, liquid-cooled data centers can host the newest systems, so they are also the only buyers in a liquidation. An appraisal of a GB300 cluster assumes such a buyer exists; the site evaluation checks the borrower has one today.

Delay spends residual. A B300 falls from about 80% of list price to 52-64% in a year in our conservative case; a cluster waiting on power spends that year before earning anything.