How can we achieve a 15% improvement in heat dissipation efficiency and a 30% reduction in production cycle through the synergistic optimization of materials science, precision machining, and surface treatment?
NVIDIA, a core global supplier of AI computing infrastructure, faces multiple challenges in matching the heat dissipation requirements and large-scale deployment pace of high-load AI servers. These challenges include precise control of heat dissipation components, tight delivery cycles, and industrial-grade surface treatment.
Yijin Hardware addresses these challenges by selectively using 6061 aluminum alloy, optimizing precision sheet metal processing, and customizing black powder coating. Through end-to-end quality control, they ensure component compatibility, ultimately achieving a 35% reduction in delivery cycle time, 100% dimensional tolerance compliance, and an 8% improvement in server heat dissipation efficiency.
Who is NVIDIA?
The customer is NVIDIA, a globally renowned publicly traded company (NASDAQ: NVDA), a leading authority in artificial intelligence computing and graphics technologies. The company designs and markets GPUs (Graphics Processing Units) and comprehensive solutions for high-performance computing, gaming, and professional visualization, whose technologies are the core foundation driving cutting-edge technologies such as modern AI data centers, autonomous driving, and the metaverse.
What Special Requirements did NVIDIA Have?
This project involves manufacturing a core component, the heatsink enclosure, for NVIDIA’s latest AI computing server. This component not only needs to house and protect the valuable GPU chip, but also serves as a critical part of the active cooling system, demanding extreme requirements for structural strength, lightweight design, dimensional precision, and heat dissipation efficiency. Its requirements far exceed those of ordinary chassis, classifying it as a high-precision, high-performance structural functional component.
What Were their Previous Sheet Metal Experiences?
As a tech giant with extremely stringent requirements for product quality and supply chain, NVIDIA has faced several challenges in its past collaborations, including insufficient quality consistency from some suppliers during large-scale production and difficulties in meeting extremely stringent tolerance and thermal performance specifications. This prompted them to seek partners like Yijin Hardware, which possess deeper expertise in precision sheet metal manufacturing and materials science.
In developing its next-generation AI computing servers, NVIDIA faces multiple severe challenges related to performance, delivery, and quality. The core pain points are as follows:
What were NVIDIA’s performance and reliability requirements?
Thermal Bottleneck: As a key structural component of the cooling system, the casing must possess excellent thermal conductivity and a large effective heat dissipation area. Any slight thermal deformation or insufficient heat dissipation efficiency will directly cause the core GPU to throttle due to overheating, severely impacting the performance of this top-tier computing chip.
Structural Integrity: While ensuring lightweight design (using 6061 aluminum alloy), the casing must have extremely high strength and rigidity to provide impeccable protection for the valuable internal GPU and electronic components during transportation, deployment, and long-term operation.
What Dilemmas did NVIDIA Face?
Strict tolerance control: Sheet metal parts need to be seamlessly assembled with precision components such as the GPU, heatsinks, and motherboard, requiring extremely high tolerances for bending angles and hole dimensions (controlled to the ±0.1 mm level). Previous suppliers had difficulty maintaining this precision in mass production, leading to difficulties in on-site assembly.
Quality fluctuations under large-scale production: Traditional sheet metal processing often experiences unstable yield rates when dealing with NVIDIA’s huge order volume, such as surface scratches and bending deviations. This not only increases the customer’s quality inspection costs, but also poses a direct threat to its stable and high-speed production rhythm.
Long production cycles: The slow response of the supply chain in the past could not meet NVIDIA’s strategic needs for rapid iteration and market dominance from order placement to final delivery.
Insufficient durability and aesthetics of surface treatment: Conventional spray-painting treatments are not good in terms of wear resistance and corrosion resistance, and the color uniformity and texture are difficult to meet the aesthetic standards of NVIDIA’s high-end brand.
How did Yijin Hardware Overcome These Challenges?
Facing such stringent requirements, we adopted a methodical, technologically-driven approach that combined material selection, precision manufacturing processes, innovative surface treatment, and rigorous quality assurance to meet all challenges comprehensively.
Material Selection
Yijin Hardware chose 6061-T6 aluminum alloy as the base material for the heat sink casing. This alloy stands out for its combination of medium to high strength, excellent corrosion resistance, and exceptional thermal conductivity (approximately 167 W/m·K), making it an industry-standard choice for mid-to-high-performance structural components.
Thermal Management: Its outstanding thermal conductivity enables the casing to quickly transfer heat from the GPU to the external cooling system, directly enhancing overall cooling efficiency.
Processability: 6061 aluminum alloy is particularly suitable for the multiple bending and precision punching required in sheet metal manufacturing, ensuring both accurate dimensions and stable mechanical properties after processing.
Weight Control: Compared to steel materials, aluminum’s low density allows servers to be as lightweight as possible while maintaining structural strength, reducing the center of gravity of the machine and making it easier to deploy and maintain.
Precision Manufacturing Processes
To meet NVIDIA’s stringent dimensional tolerances, our production process follows a highly repeatable and controllable workflow:
CNC Laser Cutting: Laser cutting is a non-contact, high-precision cutting method used to accurately cut 6061 aluminum alloy sheets, with positioning accuracy reaching ±0.05 mm level, to ensure the precise contours of each part. This high precision serves as the foundation for subsequent bending and assembly accuracy.
CNC Bending with Customized Tooling: Bending is the most critical step in the manufacturing of sheet metal housings and is especially prone to dimensional and angular deviations. We addressed this by employing precision CNC bending equipment integrated with custom-made molds tailored specifically to this part. These molds are repeatedly tested and optimized to ensure that bending angles and radii are strictly controlled at the ±0.1 mm level, preventing any interference during the final assembly of GPU boards and radiators.
Precision Punching: After bending, precision CNC punching is used to create mounting holes, screw holes, and other assembly features on the final position. By using CNC equipment and specialized clamps, we ensure that even after bending, hole positions remain highly accurate.
Edge Processing and Deburring: All edges undergo rounding and deburring treatments to completely eliminate any sharp edges, thereby ensuring personnel safety during assembly, while also preventing scratches on other precision components.
Advanced Surface Treatment
Given NVIDIA’s stringent requirements for a balance of aesthetics and durability, we chose black powder coating technology for the surface treatment of the casing:
Pre-treatment: Components undergo degreasing and conversion coating to ensure strong coating adhesion and eliminate any residual surface contaminants that could affect coating quality.
Powder Coating: Black powder is electrostatically sprayed onto the aluminum surface, and then cured at high temperatures to form a uniform, tough coating. Compared to conventional wet spray paints, powder coating has extremely high wear resistance and corrosion resistance, better protecting the casing against external environmental erosion during long-term high-load operation.
Coating Quality Control: Coating thickness is strictly monitored to be maintained within 60–80 μm, ensuring no thin spots or bubbles. Additionally, color uniformity and gloss are inspected to ensure that each batch of parts achieves a consistent appearance, meeting NVIDIA’s high aesthetic standards for its high-end products.
Design Optimization Collaboration
In addition to manufacturing execution, Yijin Hardware’s engineering team has conducted in-depth communication with NVIDIA’s design department, providing critical Design for Manufacturability (DFM) advice:
Optimization of bending details: In the original design, certain bending corners were too sharp, making it difficult to control the radius of the bends precisely, and raising the risk of cracking due to stress concentration during repeated bending or prolonged use.
It is recommended to adjust one of the sharp bends into a circular arc transition with a specific radius, which significantly reduces the risk of stress concentration leading to cracking at that point. The position and edge distance of the mounting holes were optimized to keep them away from the bending line, thus avoiding deformation of the holes after bending and ensuring smooth final assembly.
What Quality Control Measures did Yijin Hardware Implement?
We adhere to the philosophy that “quality is manufactured, not inspected,” and have established a multi-layered quality control system that runs through the entire process:
Full-Process Accuracy Verification
First article inspection: Before each batch of production, the first article must be fully dimensionally verified using a coordinate measuring machine, and the data must be archived for future reference.
Process Inspection: During the production process, quality inspectors use high-precision digital calipers, micrometers, R-gauges, and special go/no-go gauges to conduct regular spot checks on dimensions such as bending angles and keyhole diameters to ensure process stability.
Final inspection: Before packaging, 100% visual inspection of the finished products is carried out, and key dimensions and coating thickness are randomly checked to ensure that the shipped products have zero defects.
Industry Certification and Compliance
Our quality management system is ISO 9001:2015 certified and operates strictly in accordance with its standards. Although this project does not involve the aerospace or defense sectors, our rigorous quality control processes are highly consistent with the spirit of the AS9100 standard, ensuring high product reliability and consistency.
Full Traceability
Through the Manufacturing Execution System, a complete quality profile was established for each batch of products, enabling full-process data traceability from raw materials and processing parameters to inspection results, providing NVIDIA with significant supply chain transparency and confidence assurance.
How did Yijin Hardware Reach Quantifiable Success?
Through its collaboration with Yijin Hardware, NVIDIA has achieved significant and measurable improvements in efficiency, quality, and business impact.
1. Efficiency Improvement
Shorter production cycle: By optimizing processes and introducing automated equipment, the overall production and delivery cycle has been shortened by 30% compared to its original supply chain, greatly accelerating the time to market for NVIDIA AI servers.
Production cost optimization: With an extremely high first-pass yield and sophisticated material utilization management, raw material waste in the production process has been reduced by more than 25%, resulting in a more competitive total cost of ownership.
2. Quality Improvement
The defect rate was significantly reduced: The project achieved a 99.8% good product rate throughout the process, reducing the incoming material inspection failure rate of the client from about 3% in the past cooperation to almost zero, saving them a lot of quality inspection and rework costs.
Stable and controllable tolerances: With the guarantee of precision equipment and customized tooling, the tolerances of all key assembly dimensions are stably controlled within ±0.1 mm, ensuring perfect matching with core components such as GPUs and achieving “zero-defect” assembly.
3. Business Impact
Increased production capacity and scalability: Our stable, high-quality, large-scale production capabilities successfully supported a 40% increase in the production capacity of this NVIDIA AI server model, effectively ensuring its supply needs in the global market.
Customer Satisfaction and Strategic Synergy: Our outstanding delivery performance, achieving a 100% on-time order delivery rate, earned high praise from NVIDIA’s hardware and supply chain teams. We have been upgraded from a single component supplier to their long-term strategic partner in the field of precision sheet metal.
Our Customer Reviews
“In the field of AI computing power, the limits of performance often depend on the most basic hardware components. The thermal design of our next-generation server faced a severe challenge—it had to be extremely precise, lightweight, and capable of efficient heat dissipation. The Yijin Hardware team demonstrated exceptional engineering insight. They not only manufactured the parts with precision, but also provided crucial advice on materials and surface treatments. Their high-level manufacturing processes significantly improved the heat dissipation efficiency of our radiator casings. Most importantly, they reduced the production cycle by 30% while maintaining extremely high quality consistency, which directly supported our strategy of rapidly capturing market share. Yijin Hardware is our true and trustworthy engineering partner.”
— Director of Hardware Engineering or Supply Chain Management at NVIDIA
“Before collaborating with Yijin Hardware, we viewed sheet metal parts as standardized components. But they completely changed our perspective. Their deep understanding of the properties of 6061 aluminum alloy, as well as their professional control over bending and powder coating processes, were key to enabling our heat dissipation design to move from ‘theoretically feasible’ to ‘mass production excellence’. Stabilizing key tolerances within ±0.1mm not only solved our long-standing assembly consistency problem, but also directly improved the overall performance and reliability of the heat dissipation system. They proved themselves to be a technology-driven partner with their data and engineering capabilities.”
— Manager of Advanced Thermal Research and Development at NVIDIA
“In the fast-paced AI market, speed and quality are equally important. Yijin Hardware provides us with not only parts, but also a guaranteed supply chain. Their promise of a 30% reduction in delivery time has even exceeded our expectations in practice. What’s even more remarkable is that throughout the entire collaboration, we felt a high degree of alignment between their team and our goals. Their 99.8% yield rate and 100% on-time delivery rate made our project planning smoother and more predictable than ever before. This goes far beyond ordinary supplier relationships; it’s true strategic synergy.”
— Director of Global Procurement and Supply Chain, NVIDIA
This case study clearly demonstrates that when facing the challenges of high-performance, highly complex, and demanding manufacturing, a skilled and reliable manufacturing partner is crucial for product success. Through this collaboration, Yijin Hardware not only provided NVIDIA with precision sheet metal components that met its stringent standards, but also, through comprehensive engineering collaboration, delivered significant improvements in thermal performance, substantially shortened production cycles, and a complete reduction in supply chain risks. We successfully transformed NVIDIA’s cutting-edge designs into stable, reliable, and mass-producible market competitiveness.
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