AI is now a critical component of business strategy, with 75% of organisations considering it essential and 65% successfully moving AI projects into production. However, challenges like data quality, security, and high costs can hinder progress.

The Dell AI Factory approach offers a compelling solution, potentially being up to 62% more cost-effective for on-premises LLM inferencing compared to public clouds. It also helps organisations securely and easily deploy enterprise AI workloads at any scale. Dell boasts the industry’s most comprehensive AI portfolio, supporting deployments across client devices, data centres, edge locations, and clouds. Currently, over 3,000 global customers are leveraging the Dell AI Factory to accelerate their AI initiatives.

Dell Infrastructure Advancements for Scalable AI

Dell is introducing end-to-end AI infrastructure to support a wide range of needs, from edge inferencing on AI PCs to managing large-scale enterprise AI workloads in data centres.

• Dell Pro Max AI PC: This innovative laptop is the industry’s first enterprise-grade mobile workstation with a discrete NPU. Featuring a Qualcomm AI 100 PC Inference Card with 32 AI-cores and 64 GB memory, it enables fast and secure on-device inferencing for large AI models typically run in the cloud, such as today’s 109-billion-parameter models.

• Redefining AI Cooling: Dell is pioneering cooling innovations that can reduce cooling energy costs by up to 60%. The Dell PowerCool Enclosed Rear Door Heat Exchanger (eRDHx) is a self-contained airflow system that captures 100% of IT heat. When integrated into Dell’s factory-equipped IR7000 racks, the eRDHx allows organisations to:

  • Significantly cut costs by operating with warmer water temperatures (32 to 36 degrees Celsius), eliminating reliance on expensive chillers.
  • Maximise data centre capacity by deploying up to 16% more racks of dense compute without increasing power consumption.
  • Enable air cooling capacity up to 80 kW per rack for dense AI and HPC deployments.
  • Minimise risk with advanced leak detection, real-time thermal monitoring, and unified management via the Dell Integrated Rack Controller.

• Dell PowerEdge Servers with AMD GPUs: The Dell PowerEdge XE9785 and XE9785L servers will support AMD Instinct MI350 series GPUs. These GPUs offer 288 GB of HBM3E memory per GPU and deliver up to 35 times greater inferencing performance. Available in both liquid-cooled and air-cooled configurations, these servers will also help reduce facility cooling energy costs.

Efficient and Secure AI Deployments and Workflows

Recognising that AI’s power is directly tied to its data quality, Dell is enhancing its Dell AI Data Platform to improve access to high-quality structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data across the AI lifecycle.

• Dell Project Lightning: This new offering is being hailed as the world’s fastest parallel file system, delivering up to two times greater throughput than competing systems. Project Lightning is set to accelerate training time for large-scale and complex AI workflows.

• Dell Data Lakehouse Enhancements: These improvements simplify AI workflows and accelerate use cases like recommendation engines, semantic search, and customer intent detection by enabling the creation and querying of AI-ready datasets.

Additionally, new portfolio advancements will allow organisations to:

• Lower power consumption, reduce latency, and boost cost savings for high-performance computing (HPC) and AI fabrics with Dell Linear Pluggable Optics.
• Increase trust in the security of their AI infrastructure and solutions with Dell AI Security and Resilience Services, which provide full-stack protection across AI infrastructure, data, applications, and models.

Expanding the AI Partner Ecosystem

Dell is broadening its collaborations with AI ecosystem players to deliver tailored solutions seamlessly integrating into existing IT environments. Organisations can now:

• Enable intelligent, autonomous workflows with the first on-premises deployment of Cohere North, integrating various data sources while maintaining operational control.
• Innovate where data resides with Google Gemini and Google Distributed Cloud on-premises available on Dell PowerEdge XE9680 and XE9780 servers.
• Prototype and build agent-based enterprise AI applications with Dell AI Solutions with Llama, utilising Meta’s latest Llama Stack distribution and Llama 4 models.
• Securely run scalable AI agents and enterprise search on-premises with Glean, through Dell and Glean’s collaboration on the first on-premises deployment architecture for Glean’s Work AI platform.
• Build and deploy secure, customizable AI applications and knowledge management workflows with solutions jointly engineered by Dell and Mistral AI.

The Dell AI Factory is also expanding to include:

• Advancements to the Dell AI Platform with AMD, adding 200G of storage networking and an upgraded AMD ROCm open software stack to simplify workflows, support LLMs, and efficiently manage complex workloads. Dell and AMD are collaborating on Day 0 support and performance-optimised containers for AI models like Llama 4.
• The new Dell AI Platform with Intel helps enterprises deploy a full stack of high-performance, scalable AI infrastructure with Intel Gaudi 3 AI accelerators.

Dell also announced advancements to the Dell AI Factory with NVIDIA and updates to Dell NativeEdge to support AI deployments and inferencing at the edge.

Perspectives

“It has been a non-stop year of innovating for enterprises, and we’re not slowing down. We have introduced more than 200 updates to the Dell AI Factory since last year,” said Jeff Clarke, chief operating officer, Dell Technologies. “Our latest AI advancements — from groundbreaking AI PCs to cutting-edge data centre solutions — are designed to help organisations of every size to seamlessly adopt AI, drive faster insights, improve efficiency and accelerate their results.”

Christopher M. Sullivan, director of Research and Academic Computing for the College of Earth, Ocean and Atmospheric Sciences, Oregon State University, commented, “We leverage the Dell AI Factory for our oceanic research at Oregon State University to revolutionise and address some of the planet’s most critical challenges. Through advanced AI solutions, we’re accelerating insights that empower global decision-makers to tackle climate change, safeguard marine ecosystems and drive meaningful progress for humanity.”