Fancy having an AI system packed with Nvidia H200 GPUs that you can take with you from place to place? According to hardware maker Odinn, now you can, so long as you don't mind carrying a 77-pound (35 kg) box around.

At CES this week, Odinn is showcasing its Omnia system that combines AMD EPYC 9965 CPUs with up to four Nvidia H200 NVL GPUs and 6 TB of memory, all in a single enclosure with a 23.8-inch display – and carry handles.

This it describes as "roughly the size of a carry-on suitcase," though we wouldn't like to try lifting a 77 pound weight up to an overhead locker and wedging it in, and we doubt there are many airlines that would let you.

But Odinn isn't pitching Omnia as a portable PC or even a mobile workstation. Instead, it styles the system as a portable datacenter.

"As the laptop freed the desktop, Omnia frees the datacenter," its website proclaims.

This is pushing things a bit far, as most datacenters have hundreds, if not thousands, of servers in them, and any single AI server is likely to have double the maximum number of GPUs that the Omnia can have fitted.

It does, however, have built-in cooling and a redundant power supply unit (PSU) configuration with Platinum-rated units, so it is definitely workstation or server-grade hardware.

Who would want a portable datacenter, and why? Odinn lists four potential configurations of the box on its website, covering AI, Creator, Search, or Omnia X, the most powerful. The uses for these include mission-critical inferencing at the edge, film crews and postproduction houses who need a self-contained mobile workstation, military AI missions, and enterprise-grade simulations.

And there is more. The firm says that, for anyone needing even greater scale (What? More than one datacenter?), Omnia is designed to work as a building block. Multiple units can be clustered to form Infinity Racks, it claims, delivering large GPU clusters on-site.

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None of this will come cheap - a single Nvidia H200 is estimated to set you back around $32,000. It's hard to imagine many companies would let employees walk out with something so valuable and easily stolen.

However, Odinn doesn't offer any hint of pricing on its website. We asked, and will update the article if it responds.

With its built-in screen and flip-down keyboard, the Omina reminds us of something from the early days of portable computing: the famous Osborne 1 or the Compaq Portable.

Neither of those weighed anything close to 77 pounds, despite containing a CRT screen, but were arm-stretching enough to be regarded as "luggables" rather than true portables. Perhaps the Omnia should be seen as the successor to these – only much, much more powerful. ®