SC25 Showcases Next Phase of Dell and NVIDIA Partnership

Dell Technologies and NVIDIA are doubling down on their AI partnership, unveiling significant enhancements to the Dell AI Factory with NVIDIA platform at SC25. This latest iteration aims to streamline the deployment and management of diverse AI workloads, addressing a critical pain point for enterprises grappling with the complexities of scaling their AI initiatives. The updates target everything from legacy AI models to cutting-edge agent-style AI systems that are rapidly gaining traction in the enterprise.

The core challenge for many organizations, as they move beyond initial AI experiments, lies in orchestrating a heterogeneous mix of hardware and software, maintaining data governance, and ensuring the long-term scalability of their AI infrastructure. Recent market research underscores a prevailing sentiment: enterprises prefer to navigate the complexities of AI adoption with a trusted technology partner. Moreover, businesses increasingly recognize the value of deploying AI closer to their data, minimizing latency and maximizing performance.

The Dell AI Factory with NVIDIA is architected to address these needs. It represents a tightly integrated solution stack, combining Dell’s comprehensive infrastructure portfolio with NVIDIA’s industry-leading AI tools and platforms. This unified approach is further bolstered by Dell’s professional services offerings, designed to guide organizations from conceptualization to tangible, production-ready results, all while mitigating the inherent technical complexities of AI deployments.

Faster Deployment Through Integrated Platforms

Dell is expanding its storage capabilities and AI-specific features to empower organizations to automate deployment processes, optimize performance, and ensure consistent real-time AI operations. A key element of this enhancement is the integration of NVIDIA’s NIXL library from NVIDIA Dynamo with the ObjectScale and PowerScale storage engines that underpin the Dell AI Data Platform. This integration facilitates scalable Key-Value (KV) Cache storage and sharing, enabling a crucial benchmark: one-second Time to First Token (TTFT) at a 131K-token context window. This not only accelerates AI inferencing but also reduces costs and alleviates pressure on GPU memory—a significant bottleneck in many AI implementations.

Furthermore, the Dell AI Factory with NVIDIA now supports Dell PowerEdge XE7740 and XE7745 systems equipped with NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell Server Edition GPUs and NVIDIA Hopper GPUs. According to Dell, these high-performance systems provide organizations with the necessary horsepower to run larger, more complex multimodal models, agent-style workloads, computationally intensive training tasks, and demanding enterprise inferencing applications. This unlocks new possibilities for businesses seeking to leverage the full potential of AI.

Dell emphasizes that the addition of the Dell Automation Platform is designed to eliminate guesswork by providing pre-tuned and validated deployments through a secure setup process. The platform aims to deliver repeatable results and offer teams a clear, well-defined path to constructing robust AI workflows. Complementing this, software tools such as the AI code assistant powered by Tabnine and the agentic AI platform based on Cohere North are being automated, enabling teams to accelerate the transition of AI workloads into production and maintain operational efficiency as they scale.

Beyond the traditional data center, Dell’s AI PC ecosystem now encompasses devices equipped with NVIDIA RTX Blackwell GPUs and NVIDIA RTX Ada GPUs, providing organizations with a broader spectrum of hardware options across Dell laptops and desktops. Dell Professional Services is also offering interactive pilot programs that leverage a customer’s proprietary data to test AI concepts prior to large-scale investments. These pilots prioritize clear metrics and quantifiable outcomes, allowing teams to evaluate business value with greater certainty.

Next-Generation Infrastructure for Stronger AI Performance

Dell is proactively updating its infrastructure portfolio to accommodate increasingly complex AI and High-Performance Computing (HPC) workloads, with a focus on maximizing performance, scalability, and ease of management. The Dell PowerEdge XE8712, slated for release next month, supports up to 144 NVIDIA Blackwell GPUs in a single standard rack. This dramatically improves the accessibility of rack-scale AI and HPC, supported by unified monitoring and automation tools through iDRAC, OpenManage Enterprise, and the Integrated Rack Controller. This level of density and manageability is crucial for organizations pushing the boundaries of AI.

Enterprise SONiC Distribution by Dell Technologies now extends support to NVIDIA Spectrum-X platforms alongside NVIDIA’s Cumulus OS. This strategic move allows organizations to build open, standards-based AI networks capable of interoperating across different vendors, fostering flexibility and avoiding vendor lock-in. The latest release of SmartFabric Manager further enhances support for Dell’s Enterprise SONiC on NVIDIA Spectrum-X platforms, aiming to reduce deployment time and minimize setup errors through guided automation.

More Choice Through an Expanded AI Ecosystem

Recognizing that organizations are continuously refining their AI budgets and strategies, Dell and NVIDIA are committed to providing flexibility in the choice of tools and platforms. Red Hat OpenShift for the Dell AI Factory with NVIDIA has now been validated on a wider range of Dell PowerEdge systems, offering teams more options for running AI workloads at scale. The validation now includes both the Dell PowerEdge R760xa and the Dell PowerEdge XE9680 equipped with NVIDIA H100 and H200 Tensor Core GPUs. This synergy brings together Red Hat’s robust controls and governance tools with Dell’s secure infrastructure, providing a clear and reliable pathway for companies that need to scale their AI deployments while maintaining compliance and security.

Dell executives emphasize that these updates are specifically designed to facilitate the transition from limited-scope pilot projects to full-scale production deployments. Jeff Clarke, vice chairman and chief operating officer at Dell Technologies, articulated the core challenge that the Dell AI Factory with NVIDIA addresses: “How to move from AI pilots to production without rebuilding their infrastructure.” He further stated that Dell has “done the integration work so customers don’t have to,” a commitment that he believes will empower organizations to deploy and scale their AI initiatives with greater confidence and efficiency.

NVIDIA views this evolution as part of a broader paradigm shift in how companies leverage AI. Justin Boitano, vice president of Enterprise AI products at NVIDIA, characterized this moment as a transition from experimentation to true business transformation, with AI advancing at a pace that is “redefining how businesses operate.” He affirmed that Dell and NVIDIA are jointly committed to supporting this transition with a unified platform that integrates infrastructure, automation, and data tools to help organizations “deploy AI at scale and realize measurable impact.”

Industry analysts corroborate the growing demand for integrated, enterprise-grade AI systems. Ashish Nadkarni, group vice president and general manager for Infrastructure Systems, Platforms and Technologies at IDC, observed that many organizations are seeking AI-ready systems that are not only powerful but also easy to operate and manage. He concluded that the combined Dell AI portfolio with NVIDIA’s cutting-edge technology represents “a significant step forward in delivering enterprise-ready AI.”