Patel claims four to five percent of NVIDIA GPUs fail during initial burn-in testing within two weeks.
“Buy a good chip from NVIDIA, and then it ends up failing like constantly, right?”
Patel says Google deployed water cooling years before NVIDIA and achieves higher reliability than NVIDIA GPUs.
“Google's brought in water cooling for years. Right? NVIDIA only just realized they needed water cooling on this generation. And Google's brought in a level of reliability that NVIDIA GPUs don't have.”
Patel explains GB200's 72-GPU configuration creates reliability challenges compared to 8-GPU systems due to higher failure probability.
“If the reliability of each GPU is the same, then when a single GPU fails in 72 GPUs, you have a much higher chance of something failing, right?”
Patel reports 10-15% of NVIDIA GPUs fail and require RMA within first two weeks of cluster deployment.
“When you first turn on the cluster, about ten to fifteen percent of them fail RMA in the first two weeks. Wow. And then that's fine. Like you have to receipt them, whatever.”
Patel reports 15% of deployed Blackwell GPUs require RMA within first deployment period.
“Even today, 15% of Blackwells or so that get deployed have to be RMA'd. You have to take them out.”