Half the trouble of building an Nvidia NVL or AMD Helios competitor is just getting the networking out of the box
COMPUTEX 2026 It’s hard enough for startups to compete with AMD and Nvidia on chip design. The rise of rack-scale architectures has only made things harder.Companies not only have to invest in chip design but also the mechanical, thermal, and power engineering necessary to pack six dozen or more AI accelerators into a single rack that functions as one enormous GPU.At Computex last week, Delos Data, a startup funded by former Intel and Barefoot Networks execs, showed off a modular server platform aimed at giving chip startups a shortcut to rack scale.
One of the challenges with the move to rack scale is actually the sheer amount of networking that needs to be enabled at the box. A typical eight GPU HGX node only needs one or two ports per GPU. By comparison, a GB300 NVL72 needs 18 400 Gbps ports per GPU.
Nvidia and AMD have developed custom racks with integrated backplanes, power delivery, and cooling. Delos by comparison is keeping things relatively simple by designing a chassis that, at least from the front, looks more like a switch than a GPU server.
Here's a look at Delos Data's reference design. The front of the system features 36 OSFP cages, each capable of 1.6 Tbps of bandwidth.
