Part of the day: Motherboards, CPU trays, switch trays

Assembled by the nightly build from this catalog’s own entry for Motherboards, CPU trays, switch trays (4.04, Layer 4 — Servers, racks & integration). The tables below are rebuilt every night; first published 2026-09-20, refreshed 2026-09-24.

The non-GPU trays in a rack — CPU-only compute trays, host motherboards and the switch trays carrying scale-up switch silicon — built by the same board makers as the GPU trays.

This part covers the trays that round out a rack-scale system alongside the GPU baseboard (4.03): CPU-only compute trays for control and orchestration nodes, conventional server motherboards, and switch trays that carry the scale-up switch silicon (3.01) linking GPU trays together. The same ODM tier that builds GPU baseboards builds these, joined by motherboard specialists who don’t necessarily compete for GPU-tray business. AI racks need more of this category than a conventional data center rack: a rack-scale cabinet carries dedicated switch trays purely to fan out the scale-up fabric, a tray type that barely existed before rack-scale GPU systems. For investors, this is a lower-margin, higher-volume counterpart to the GPU baseboard — less differentiated, more competitive — so the interesting question is less “who wins” and more whether a builder’s exposure here dilutes or complements its GPU-tray economics.

AI delta: Rack-scale GPU systems require dedicated switch trays purely to fan out the scale-up fabric between GPU trays, a tray category that has little equivalent in conventional servers.

Who makes it

The full entry — sub-categories, news, videos and sources — lives on the Motherboards, CPU trays, switch trays page.