Dell Technologies

In this Vendor Showdown presentation, moderated by Addison Snell of Intersect360 Research and Rupak Biswas of NASA Ames Research Center, Paul Brook of Dell Technologies pitches Dell's AI factory concept with an emphasis on customer choice. He presents Dell AI factories as blueprints and co-designed building blocks that can be configured with either AMD (including its ROCm software ecosystem) or NVIDIA technology, and argues that just as every manufacturing plant differs, every customer's AI factory should be their own, open to substituting components such as alternative silicon or the customer's own software. Dell reports having announced 5,000 AI factories. In the question round, Brook characterizes the NVIDIA-based offering as closer to turnkey with co-designed products and consistent support, while the AMD route offers more open-source flexibility and suits customers who want to build sandboxes, stressing that both can be delivered as services. On sustainability, he highlights designing for end of life from the start, including recycling documentation and building durable systems, along with sustainable manufacturing practices. On security, he argues that the outputs of AI factories and HPC systems, particularly corporate intellectual property, are more critical than ever and must be protected through strong security practice and data backup, for both commercial and publicly funded research organizations. He closes by describing the Dell AI data platform as a modular, not NVIDIA-only concept whose components can be exchanged.