The past year has been a shaky one for Intel. The company faced product delays, an executive shakeup, and the ousting of former CEO Bob Swan. Despite ongoing challenges and growing competition, Dell Technologies CEO and Founder Michael Dell hasn’t lost faith in the chipmaker, especially now that his long-time friend and former employee Pat Gelsinger has taken the reins.

“I know you're going to do a great job getting Intel revved up again,” Dell told Gelsinger, during a brief chat ahead of the company’s PowerEdge refresh, earlier this week.

Gelsinger, who returned to Intel in February, had previously served as president and COO of Dell EMC and most recently as CEO of VMware, which Dell Technologies is a majority shareholder.

Dell kicked off the conversation by touting the companies' role in helping the world transition to a new reality in the wake of the pandemic. Customers had to move more quickly than ever to adapt to changing dynamics surrounding remote work, and technology was often the solution, he said.

“Sometimes, it takes a decade to make a week of progress. Sometimes, it takes a week to make a decade of progress,” Gelsinger said, echoing Dell’s point. “We clearly saw that being the case where literally retail [saw] 10 years of progress inside of one month; a 100x increase of video conferencing for medical delivery; the largest migration in human workforce in human history in just a few short weeks.”

This, he said, was only possible thanks to digital infrastructure and partnerships between companies like Intel and Dell Technologies.

“I don’t think customers are going to go back to the way it was,” Dell said. “Now, I think it's about accelerating and going faster on the new growth engines around artificial intelligence, machine learning, new network technologies like 5G, and of course automation.”

“This means moving intelligence to the edge, being able to process that data in real time to create better outcomes, and securing those processes,” he added.

Dell closed by asserting his confidence that the two companies would be able to tackle these challenges and continue to accelerate the next phase of digital transformation.

And to this end, Intel has moved aggressively to diversify its portfolio in recent years to include 5G base station silicon, FPGAs, GPUs, ASICs, and dedicated AI accelerators.

But despite Gelsinger’s deep ties to his former employer, Dell has increasingly hedged its bets when it comes to silicon.

This week, Dell announced 17 new PowerEdge servers in lockstep with AMD’s EPYC 3 processor launch. The most powerful of these new systems boasts twin 64-core EYPC processors and up to four of Nvidia's A100 GPUs. And while Dell also announced Intel options, those won’t be available until May, when the chipmaker’s long-delayed IceLake Xeon Scalable platform is expected to launch.