Artificial intelligence (AI) is quickly transforming business in ways we never could have imagined just a few years ago (except maybe in the realm of sci-fi).

But the groundbreaking technology has also introduced numerous challenges, notably around infrastructure, power demands, data access and quality and skilled expertise to home in on the right use cases.

Ultimately, AI requires a special infrastructure and ecosystem built specifically for its needs. Dell Technologies says it is delivering this capability with its new Dell AI Factory. This architecture that Dell calls end-to-end provides the data management and protection, storage, networking, services and partner ecosystem required to support today’s complex AI deployments. The tech giant announced new components to the AI Factory today at Dell Technologies World.

“Just like physical factories fueled the Industrial Revolution, AI factories will power the AI revolution — but instead of physical goods, the AI factory produces insights and intelligence,” Sam Grocott, SVP of product marketing for Dell, said in a pre-briefing. “We believe every customer is going to need an AI factory of all different shapes and sizes.”

Getting over the hurdle to adopting AI Organizations are feeling “extreme pressure” to accelerate AI adoption, Grocott noted, but they also face many challenges.

“First, it's really complex and it's just frankly too darn hard for them to get going,” he said. “They just don't know where to get started, or they lack the necessary skills that are required to stand up a successful AI solution.”

Also, many enterprises are finding it difficult to access relevant and accurate data to make AI “really, really worthwhile.” Further, it’s risky when it comes to data sovereignty, IP leakage and other privacy issues.

“They really just cannot afford to jeopardize their data or their intellectual property,” said Grocott. Finally, it’s expensive and difficult to find true ROI use cases in “these early innings.”

Dell’s portfolio spanning devices, servers, storage, data protection and networking are the foundation of the Dell AI Factory. The foundational five elements, Grocott explained, include: data management and protection; infrastructure; an open ecosystem of trusted partners; services and expertise; and use cases.

The latter is often the most difficult element, said Grocott. “This is where we see our customers really struggling: Where do I get started?”

He explained that the Dell AI Factory is not a single product or SKU: Organizations can choose by individual product or use case. Dell offers a variety of consumption models, including subscription, fully deployment and as-a-service. This is supplemented by a professional services team that helps them along the way, from inception and ideation to deployment to management and operation.

“As organizations explore how to benefit from AI, it’s clear there isn't a one-size-fits-all approach,” said Mike Leone, principal analyst for data analytics and AI with TechTarget’s Enterprise Strategy Group. “The Dell AI Factory brings together Dell’s differentiated infrastructure, services and partner ecosystem to help customers quickly and easily adopt AI on their own terms.”

Infrastructure to support AI workloads AI needs data that is quality and as close as possible. To manage and protect data, Dell has made several advancements, including the following

  • Dell PowerScale F910 all-flash file storage, which the company says delivers up to 127% improvement in performance and superior density.
  • PowerScale Project Lightning, a new parallel file system software architecture that will be integrated into PowerScale to accelerate training times.
  • AI and app data protection software and appliances along with a reference design.
  • Dell PowerSwitch Z9864F-ON, powered by Broadcom chipset to deliver high throughput, low latency and easy scalability.
  • Dell PowerEdge XE9680, which supports Broadcom ethernet adapters for better performance, scalability and efficiency through robust ethernet fabrics.
  • Enterprise SONiC Distribution and SmartFabric Manager to help simplify deployment, orchestration and lifecycle management.
“As GPUs become more and more performant, they’re going to need more and more data and more throughput,” Varun Chhabra, SVP of infrastructure (ISG) and telecom marketing at Dell, said during the pre-briefing. Also, “as AI workloads become more and more mission critical, so is the need to protect data that is powering these AI workloads.”

Expanded partnerships with Nvidia, Meta, Hugging Face, Microsoft Azure Dell touts its wide partner ecosystem, which it is further expanding on today.

For instance, the company will launch the Dell Enterprise Hub on the Hugging Face platform. The goal is to simplify on-premises deployment for the most popular open-source multimodal language models available on Hugging Face and curated and tuned for Dell infrastructure, Chhabra explained.

“Hugging Face’s platform has become the de facto repository for open source AI models, as well as open source libraries and datasets,” he said.

Dell will also expand on its collaboration with Meta to help organizations simplify deployment of Llama 3 on-premises. Meanwhile, the Dell APEX cloud platform for Microsoft Azure will help speed deployment for services such as speech transcription and translation, Chhabra explained.

Dell is playing a “massive leadership role” in building an open ecosystem for AI, said Grocott. “Just like physical factories need a robust supply chain to succeed, AI factories are dependent on a dynamic AI ecosystem for success,” he said.

Expanded services portfolio; tight integration with Nvidia Finally, as part of the Dell AI Factory, Dell is expanding its portfolio of AI professional services. This includes the following:

  • Implementation services for Microsoft Copilot tools with expert guidance for GitHub, Windows, security and Sales.
  • Accelerator services for the Dell Enterprise Hub on Hugging Face to support rapid AI prototyping with support on tool and model selection as well as use case alignment.
The tech giant also today announced the Dell AI Factory with Nvidia. Platform infrastructure includes these features:
  • The Dell PowerEdge XE9680L server, which provides direct liquid cooling and eight Nvidia Blackwell Tensor Core GPUs for fast processing.
  • Dense and energy efficient turnkey rack-scale tools to accelerate large Blackwell deployments
  • Dell NativeEdge, the first edge orchestration platform that automates the delivery of Nvidia AI enterprise software.
Among other new partnerships and products, Dell is rolling out several new devices to support enterprise AI adoption. Notably are AI PCs: The Qualcomm Snapdragon X series of notebooks will feature all day battery life up to 27 hours, with 13 billion parameters running on-device to deliver low latency, explained Kevin Terwilliger, VP and GM with Dell's client product group. The devices will also incorporate a dedicated Microsoft Copilot key.

“We know that the AI PC revolution is here,” said Terwilliger. “There’s tons of excitement, and that's for good reason.”