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Dell PowerEdge XE9640

4 × H100 SXM per node, with 4 compute rails at 400G. That is 1.6 Tb/s of scale-out network per node.

What this means for the fabric

4 compute NICs means 4 rails. In a rail-optimized design each of those rails is sized on its own against the node count, then multiplied back up, so the leaf tier is driven by the rail count and not by the total endpoint count.

Storage and in-band management are separate fabrics with their own switches and their own optics, and the 1 BMC port per node feed the out-of-band network, which also has to carry every switch and every PDU in the cluster.

Power and racks

At 5.5 kW typical draw, this node fills a rack's power budget long before it fills the space. A 45 kW rack takes 8 of them on power alone, against 21 on rack units. Power is what actually sets the rack count.

Notes

Dense 2U liquid-cooled 4-GPU node. Halving rails halves the leaf switch count for a given node count, but doubles the nodes needed for a given GPU target.

Source: Dell PowerEdge XE9640 documentation, verified 2026-08. Power is approximate. Needs verification 2026-08-06

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