9 hours ago
Dell wants to set up AI factories in your office
Bengaluru: Dell Technologies is making the establishment of industrial-scale artificial intelligence infrastructure as easy as any other office equipment: fully assembled, ready to be bolted down and switched on.
That's the idea of the firm's "AI factory" – a self-contained stack of servers, storage, networking and software that can be trundled straight into a data room and start turning proprietary data into working models within hours.
"We already have about 2,000 customers running some parts of the factory," said Arunkumar Narayanan, Dell's senior vice-president for compute and networking, who sits out of the US but was in India recently.
The idea arose when executives realised that most corporate AI pilots stalled not on algorithms but on plumbing: incompatible hardware, scattered datasets and a shortage of engineers who understand GPU clusters. "If data is your secret sauce you want the compute on-prem (not on cloud), yet nobody wants a two-year integration project," he argued. "So we just build the whole thing and let you wheel it in."
Each factory is delivered in sizes that range from a single rack for proof-of-concept work to a warehouse-scale pod.
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Every stack can be ordered with either air- or liquid-cooled accelerator trays. The latter is becoming the default as Nvidia's forthcoming Blackwell GPUs push past 1000 watts a card. "Twelve months ago nine out of ten racks we shipped were air-cooled; in two years, seven out of ten will be liquid," Narayanan said.
Indian engineering lies behind much of the design. Dell's largest server team sits in Bengaluru and the mainstream two-socket racks that form the backbone of smaller factories are built at Sriperumbudur, near Chennai.
While the company still assembles its flagship AI nodes in other regions, Narayanan hinted that a dedicated Indian line "is only a matter of demand". Local demand is not in doubt. On a recent tour, Narayanan met Mumbai banks seeking faster fraud detection, the National Stock Exchange looking to accelerate the world's busiest order book, and outsourcers keen to offload customer support onto generative chatbots.
All wanted the same thing: cloud-like flexibility without surrendering sensitive data.
That, Dell believes, is exactly what an AI factory provides. "You decide the use-case, we ship the factory, and your model starts working within hours of arriving on site."
