Dell Technologies is selling data shovels for the AI gold rush

In a gold rush, sell shovels.

That seems to be the approach of Dell Technologies, the Round Rock, Texas-headquartered tech behemoth, when it comes to what is almost certainly the biggest technological revolution of the past century—artificial intelligence (AI).

Indeed, AI was the unifying theme at Dell Technologies World 2024, the company’s recently concluded flagship event in Las Vegas, Nevada. Dell Technologies not only highlighted an impressive array of both enterprise and consumer hardware geared towards harnessing the power of AI, it also delved deep into its strategy to not just participate in but power the global AI transformation.

Dell’s singular focus on AI isn’t surprising. As ServiceNow CEO Bill McDermott said in a cameo appearance during Dell CEO Michael Dell’s keynote address on day 1, AI is expected to have an $11 trillion impact on global gross domestic product (GDP). 

“For me, every workflow in every enterprise in every industry in every corner of the world will be reinvented with Gen AI (generative AI), and that's why I believe that this business transformation is of a generational magnitude,” McDermott proclaimed.

While Dell is looking to bring this transformation into the homes and offices of everyday users with a new lineup of high-performance, AI-enabled laptops it announced at the event, the real focus of its AI efforts is in enabling the AI transformation of enterprises.

To this end, the company unveiled its AI Factory initiative, which helps enterprises set up AI-optimised data centres using a combination of Dell’s own data centre offerings—including PowerStore Prime, the newest iteration of the company’s market-leading PowerStore storage platform—and professional services along with a bevvy of technology and services from Dell’s partners, including the likes of chip-maker Nvidia and others.

“AI is transforming business at an unprecedented pace. Data centres must be designed from the ground up to handle AI’s speed and scale, while new AI PCs are transforming productivity and collaboration,” Jeff Clarke, Vice Chairman and Chief Operating Officer of Dell Technologies, said at the event.

“What’s needed are new IT infrastructure and devices purpose-built to meet the specific demands of AI. The Dell AI Factory helps customers accelerate AI adoption with the world’s broadest AI portfolio and leading AI ecosystem partners, offering right-sized approaches and greater control over AI deployments on-premises, at the edge and across cloud environments.”

This approach squares nicely with the growing trend of enterprises—both big and small—increasingly looking to move their AI workloads into on-premises data centres. This is because, as Michael Dell explained, inferencing for large language models can be 75% cheaper using on-premises data centres versus public cloud systems. Over the course of the event, there were showcases of the AI Factory in action, with Japanese car maker Subaru, for instance, showcasing how it uses a Dell AI Factory to train its self-driving technology.  

As NVidia CEO, Co-founder, and President Jensen Huang said during his appearance on the Dell Technologies World mainstage, “The last industrial revolution was the manufacturing of software, previous [to that] it was the manufacturing of electricity, now we are manufacturing intelligence… The opportunity for us is severalfold. Immediately, you've got a trillion dollars worth of data centres in the world that were created for the last generation of [computing] that is going to be completely modernised to this new form.”

“The second, on top of that, which is really the exciting part… is a whole new class of data centres that are designed for just one purpose—the purpose of manufacturing intelligence at scale. We call it AI factories,” Huang said.

The ability to deploy these turnkey AI factories is what Dell believes will set it apart from its competition over the coming years, as more and more enterprises increasingly look to use their proprietary data to develop AI solutions to increase their workforce productivity or improve their customer experience.

In a conversation on the sidelines of the event with Varun Chhabra, Senior Vice President of product marketing at Dell Technologies, he touched on exactly this. “If you look at it from a server perspective, a data storage perspective, or a data security perspective, we are the market leader in all those capabilities,” Chhabra told YourStory. 

Ultimately, however, the real differentiator won’t just be the company’s hardware advancements alone. “Across the next two years, what will really determine success [in this space] is how vendors like Dell work with ecosystem partners like software providers, work with services, to really bundle that all up into turnkey solutions that are use case-oriented,” Chhabra concluded.

(The author was at Dell Technologies World in Las Vegas, Nevada, at the invitation of Dell Technologies.)