Michael Dell: “If you aren’t already thinking about AI and how it will change every part of your business, then you are already behind”
AI was a major theme at the recent Dell Tech World event in Las Vegas, with company CEO, Chairman and Founder Michael Dell stressing the role opportunity AI opens to “reimagine” how businesses and workers function. He also noted that enterprises will use proprietary foundation models will help ground AI for outcome-oriented, business-specific use cases. To help accelerate adoption of AI into enterprises, Dell announced at the event a partnership with NVIDIA to combine the former’s hardware with the latter’s GPUs and software.
NVIDIA is, in many ways, at the center of the AI hype making the rounds in the mainstream media and within CTO and CIO offices around the business world. Project Helix—the name of the partnership—is a “series of full-stack solutions with technical expertise and pre-built tools based on Dell and NVIDIA infrastructure and software,” according to the companies. “It includes a complete blueprint to help enterprises use their proprietary data and more easily deploy generative AI responsibly and accurately.” Specifically, some Dell PowerEdge servers have been optimized for AI training and inference, and combined with NVIDIA’s H100 Tensor Core GPU and AI Enterprise software. General availability is set for July.
NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang appeared via video during a keynote session with Dell’s co-COO Jeff Clarke. Huang said, “Every company will be able to put AI to use to revolutionize their products and their companies…We’ve seen the PC revolution, the internet, cloud and mobile, but generative AI is a much, much bigger deal.” He called generative AI three things in one: an easy-to-use application, the ability to connect to anything and take any form of data input, and a new computing platform.
Commenting on the enterprise preference for using proprietary data, and what that means for where data processing takes place, Huang said, “They have to do it on-prem because that’s where their data is…You also want it to be at the edge because, in the future, you want to have information from multiple modalities.” He said making decisions as close to the edge as possible opens up real-time responsiveness and “is essential” for enterprise digital transformation.
NVIDIA is steadily striking AI-focused partnerships, including work with Softbank to leverage the move from operators toward cloud-native networking and distributed computing infrastructure. Basically, Softbank will use NVIDIA tech to stand up compute infrastructure that can run 5G radio access network workloads alongside AI workloads. Positioning AI alongside RAN would allow for network optimizations, and AI-optimized compute overhead could be sold out in a variety of business models.
