Dell Technologies pitches its hardware for AI data centers
Servers, networking and storage hardware take center stage at Dell Technologies World 2025, as well as a tightly integrated offering with AI titans such as Nvidia and Google.
LAS VEGAS -- Dell Technologies wants to be the hardware platform of choice for enterprise AI data centers.
The hardware vendor's PowerEdge servers, PowerSwitch routers and ObjectScale storage hardware will all receive hardware and software refreshes, Dell executives said at the annual Dell Technologies World (DTW) conference Monday.
This hardware rollout also includes numerous integrations with AI chip titan Nvidia that support Nvidia's AI software stack and GPUs, as well as new AI partner integrations from Google Cloud and Meta, among others.
Although numerous infrastructure vendors are chasing some of the most demanding customers, such as DDN selling to X (formerly Twitter) and its associated AI data centers, there's still a market for smaller AI deployments, said Ray Lucchesi, founder and president of Silverton Consulting.
Enterprise customers courted by Dell may be using existing AI services within the cloud, but they also want to conduct retrieval-augment generation (RAG) or other refining services on data closer to the edge, he said.
There's a lot of AI infrastructure being sold, and Dell wants a piece.
Ray LucchesiFounder and President, Silverton Consulting
"There's a lot of AI infrastructure being sold, and Dell wants a piece," Lucchesi said. "The edge is getting more sophisticated, and [enterprise IT teams are] trying to reduce the amount of data that needs to be passed back and forth."
These new launches are expected to take place throughout the year, according to Dell spokespeople.
AI hardware for the enterprise
The new Dell PowerEdge servers shown Monday include the air-cooled XE9780 and XE9785, as well as the liquid-cooled XE9780L and XE9785L. Other designs, including the XE9712 and XE7745, are launching in July alongside upcoming Nvidia hardware refreshes like the Nvidia GB300 NVL72 and the RTX Pro 5000 Blackwell GPUs.
To support hardware connections, Dell's networking offerings expand with Dell PowerSwitch SN5600, SN2201 Ethernet and Nvidia's Quantum-X800 InfiniBand switches.
Dell ObjectScale storage hardware now integrates with Nvidia BlueField-3 and Spectrum-4 networking, alongside new support for S3 over remote direct memory access, to support Dell's AI Factory initiative.
The AI Factory, which rolled out at last year's DTW, is a stack of technologies for AI training and workloads in the enterprise. The AI Factory stack will also support new integrations with Cohere, Google Cloud, Red Hat, Meta, Mistral AI and Glean as part of an upcoming refresh.
All of these launches will draw some interest from enterprise customers, and AI infrastructure purchases tend not to be a single box or two, said Simon Robinson, an analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group, a division of Omdia. Instead, most will agree to a significant number of hardware buys to cover every branch of an enterprise's AI needs.
"The aggregate opportunity to sell a huge amount of infrastructure to a small number of customers isn't one to ignore," Robinson said.
The Dell AI Factory server hardware will include AMD and Intel variants, with this year as the first time the AI factory has sold with Intel chips, according to Dell spokespeople.
Outside of cloud providers or specialist AI vendors, most customers likely won't need to build entire AI data centers from scratch but will instead complement locations at the edge, said Mike Matchett, principal analyst and founder of Small World Big Data.
AI models are typically accessed through the cloud but are now available in customer data centers, like Google Cloud's Gemini, for specific uses like RAG, he said. This is an opportunity for Dell to sell its hardware if it can guarantee interoperability and certifications.
"I think that's how the future goes. [Enterprises] don't need to run a bigger or faster LLM, but [they] need the relevant data," Matchett said. "These are going to be cheaper than Nvidia's SuperPods, [so] there's definitely a midmarket here."
Tim McCarthy is a news writer for Informa TechTarget covering cloud and data storage.
