Dell AI Factory Closes the Gap Between AI Ambition and Real Outcomes
Most enterprises don’t struggle with AI ambition. They struggle with AI execution. That is the core message Dell Technologies delivered at Dell Technologies World on May 18, 2026, as the company announced a broad set of advancements to the Dell AI Factory with NVIDIA.
The Dell AI Factory with NVIDIA now serves more than 5,000 customers. Despite that scale, data availability and quality remain the top barriers to production AI across every stage of enterprise maturity. Pilots stall, and agentic AI stays out of reach. Dell’s answer is a simplified, integrated approach it claims can accelerate time-to-value by up to 84%.
Michael Dell, chairman and CEO, put it plainly: “Every organisation now faces the same challenge, turn intelligence into impact at speed or become obsolete. We’re helping customers turn their data into AI fuel on infrastructure they control, with security, governance and cost efficiency.”
Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA, added that enterprise AI adoption is “going parabolic,” and that Dell and NVIDIA are building a full-stack AI factory, from the desktop to the data centre, to match the moment.
One of the headline releases is Dell Deskside Agentic AI. Powered by NVIDIA NemoClaw, it lets enterprises build and run autonomous agents locally, with data that never leaves the device. Dell says organisations can break even against public cloud API costs in as little as three months. Furthermore, NVIDIA OpenShell, the secure runtime for autonomous agents, now runs across the entire Dell AI Factory.
On the data side, the Dell AI Data Platform receives meaningful upgrades. Orchestration and search enhancements can now index billions of unstructured files and connect them into governed pipelines. Inside the platform, the Dell Data Analytics Engine, powered by Starburst, delivers up to 6x faster query performance on NVIDIA Blackwell GPUs, with support planned for future Vera CPU platforms.
Infrastructure also expands. Dell is adding PowerRack, a fully integrated compute, networking, and storage system, to what it calls the industry’s broadest AI infrastructure portfolio. As the top rack-scale infrastructure provider, Dell ships more than twice the rack-scale servers of its closest competitor. Additionally, the new Dell PowerCool CDU C7000 meets the cooling demands of the NVIDIA Vera Rubin NVL72 platform in a compact 4U form factor.
The new Dell AI Ecosystem Program gives software providers a structured path to validate solutions on Dell AI Factory infrastructure. For enterprises, this translates to lower-risk production paths and faster proof-of-concept to production cycles. Partners joining the ecosystem include Google, Hugging Face, OpenAI, Palantir, Reflection, ServiceNow, and SpaceXAI.
Notably, Google and Dell are collaborating to bring Gemini 3 Flash models on Google Distributed Cloud to Dell PowerEdge XE9780 servers, fully on-premises and within a confidential computing environment. Meanwhile, the Dell Enterprise Hub on Hugging Face gives enterprises access to open-weight models, including DeepSeek and Kimi K2.6, optimised for Dell AI Factory infrastructure.
OpenAI is also in the mix. The two companies will explore bringing Codex closer to enterprise data stored on the Dell AI Data Platform, making AI agents more useful where internal workflows and codebases already live. Palantir’s Foundry and AIP platform, similarly, will deploy on-premises on Dell ObjectScale and PowerFlex, feeding enterprise AI directly from internal data sources.
In short, the Dell AI Factory with NVIDIA is no longer just an infrastructure play. It is, increasingly, the bridge enterprises need to cross from AI ambition to AI outcomes.
