Intel Gaudi 2 HL-225 is OAM-only with no PCIe SKU - needs a UBB chassis + 24x 100GbE fabric to light up

A bare Gaudi 2 HL-225 module (~$1,500-2,700 on eBay) cannot be installed in a workstation - it has no PCIe edge connector and no standalone power/cooling path. It requires the Gaudi UBB baseboard (8-module tray ~$11,995) plus a 24x 100GbE fabric just to boot.

HL-225 is an OAM (OCP Accelerator Module) part - Intel never shipped a PCIe SKU for it. The module is designed to live on an 8-accelerator universal baseboard inside a chassis like the Supermicro 820GH-TNR2, interconnected over RoCE/100GbE. The cheap module price reflects the fact that the host chassis, not the silicon, is the expensive part.

There is no workstation workaround - this is a rack/chassis product. Only buy if you already have or can source a Gaudi OAM chassis and fabric. The MLPerf 8x number (8,034.85 tok/s aggregate) is batch-1024 serving on that chassis, not a single-user card. Treat the rumoured $700-900 module price as a stale 2025 liquidation echo - it is not showing on eBay Oct-2026.

Same form-factor trap as SXM (see gotcha-sxm-module-needs-carrier-baseboard) but worse: an SXM2 module at least has a $55-205 adapter path, while Gaudi 2 has no PCIe path at all. Ecosystem is thin and Intel is winding the line down.