Overview

The Plugable Thunderbolt 5 AI Enclosure (TBT5-AI) combines the incredible bandwidth of Thunderbolt 5 and a user-provided graphics processing unit (GPU) along with 3rd-party AI applications in order to provide a secure, private, on-premise local AI infrastructure.

Features and Specifications

The TBT5-AI enclosure hardware has the following features and specifications:

850W internal power supply, providing a maximum of 600W to the internal GPU
1x 80cm Thunderbolt 5 cable
1x upstream Thunderbolt 5 port that can provide up to 96W of USB Power Delivery to the host system
1x downstream Thunderbolt 5 port capable of providing up to 15W of USB Power Delivery for Thunderbolt or USB-C peripherals
1x downstream 10Gbps USB-C port providing up to 15W of USB Power Delivery for USB-C peripherals
3x downstream 10Gbps USB-A ports each providing up to 7.5W of power for USB-A peripherals
1x 2.5Gbps Ethernet network port

Capabilities

At its core, the TBT5-AI is an external PCI Express enclosure that allows you to add a high-performance graphics processing unit (GPU) to a Windows 11 host computer that supports Thunderbolt 5 (or Thunderbolt 4 with a reduced level of performance).

Leveraging the 80Gbps of bandwidth provided by Thunderbolt 5 and a high performance dedicated GPU from Nvidia or AMD provides the ability to host and operate local AI infrastructure that would otherwise not be possible by using 3rd-party AI applications such as Ollama, LM Studio, Microsoft Foundry Local, or Nvidia NIM (required Nvidia GPU).

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LLM, Local AI, TBT5-AI

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