Dell Technologies’ artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure business will see its next wave of growth come from enterprises and governments, not the cloud providers who snapped up a lot of the early hardware, according to a senior company executive.

“If you go back two-and-a-half, three years ago, we had a $2bn business in accelerated servers, and it’s grown from essentially nothing to a substantial part of our business,” said Sam Burd, chief strategy officer at Dell. “It’s a mix of neoclouds, enterprises and sovereigns in that business.”

Dell has more than 6,500 customers for its AI systems now. The last figure announced at Dell Technologies World in May was 5,000. More customers signed up in the last two quarters than the previous six, he told Computer Weekly on the sidelines of Dell Technologies Forum in Singapore. “Those engagements are accelerating.”

And it’s not just graphics processing units (GPUs). Burd said there’s also growing demand for CPUs as more AI agents are deployed. “And it’s kind of obvious, but storage and data also really matter in AI,” he added, pointing to growth in Dell’s wider infrastructure offerings that make up the AI factory, a reference architecture that bundles servers, storage, networking and software with services and financing.

Andy Sim, vice-president and managing director of Dell Technologies Singapore, said that while customers used to engage the supplier whenever they wanted to buy a server, storage array or PC, Dell’s success today comes from helping customers build AI factories.

“You cannot bolt AI into your infrastructure,” he said. “You’ve got to rebuild it. And when you rebuild it, you’ve got to work with somebody who knows and has done it before.

“We are looking at a platform conversation rather than a product conversation, because whether you have data on-premises or you have it on the cloud or you have it distributed, you need someone to orchestrate it.”

Some technology consultancies, such as Thoughtworks, have recommended that clients rent rather than buy AI infrastructure because the hardware ages quickly and usage rarely justifies the capital. Burd rejects the idea that it is an either-or situation.

“There’s no one size fits all,” he said. “We believe intelligence will go to the data, and there’s a lot of data in the enterprise. There’s a lot of data on the edge.”

The time frame that companies are looking at to recoup their investments has shortened, too. While infrastructure was once bought to last 20 years and then left alone, Dell now works with customers on use cases meant to pay for themselves within two years, after which the architecture and models behind it get looked at again, said Burd.

And those that are waiting for the technology to settle will eventually lose out, he added. “You’re going to be standing there at the street corner waiting forever, and the traffic’s going by, and your competitors are going to run you over in a big truck.”

Nor does he think buying early is the mistake it is made out to be, because older accelerators are still earning their keep.

“We have multi-generations old AI products in production, adding value in use cases that we have, and we are not unique in that,” he said, noting that rental rates for Nvidia’s H100 have increased over time. “It’s not like I’m binning the stuff from a year ago.”

Amid the volatile geopolitical landscape, more organisations across Asia are looking to exert greater control over their technology infrastructure through digital sovereignty, which involves several different requirements that tend to be lumped together.

“It can be everything from where stuff is made to, do I have control of things? Do I have control of models? Do I have control of my data?” said Burd.

Sim said Dell is meeting sovereignty requirements through open standards and physical options, including colocation space for customers without their own datacentre capacity.

More than just a technology supplier, Dell is also looking to become a trusted adviser to customers. The company operates executive briefing centres where customers spend anything from a day to a week with its engineers at no charge, before any paid consulting, deployment or support work comes into it.

“We’re helping them get to outcomes rather than just, here’s hardware, go figure it out,” said Burd, adding that Dell also works with the global systems integrators and consultancies its customers already use.

Asked how much long-range strategy is possible in a market moving this fast, he said the discipline itself has changed. “If you go back to the old days, strategy was a lot more of a fixed process,” said Burd. “So, we’ve thrown all that in the trash can.”

One prediction he was willing to make concerns where the workloads end up. “You’ve got datacentre all the rage, but you think about where data is and work gets done. I think the edge and desk-side devices are going to be interesting,” he said. “Not enough people are talking about that, but we will be soon.”

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