AI partnerships took top billing at Dell Technologies World 2024, held in Las Vegas from May 20 to May 23. Major news from the conference so far included:

• Five new AI-capable laptops.
• More integrations between NVIDIA and Dell’s AI Factory, Dell’s AI enablement program.
• New partnerships with Hugging Face, Meta and Microsoft.

Dell reveals AI capabilities on XPS, Latitude and Inspiron Laptops

New Dell PCs are getting in on the generative AI boom, with the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Series processor coming to five new models:

• XPS 13, coming later this year with preorders beginning May 20 in the U.S.. The price starts at $1,299. Preorders start May 21 in the U.K., Germany, France and Japan.
• Inspiron 14, coming later this year with price to be announced.
• Inspiron 14 Plus coming later this year, with preorders beginning May 20 in the U.S.. The price starts at $1,099. Preorders start May 21 in the U.K., Germany, France and Japan.
• Latitude 5455, coming later this year with price to be announced.
• Latitude 7455, coming later this year with price to be announced.

The Qualcomm processor brings 45 NPU TOPS, essentially meaning 13 billion parameter large language models like Meta’s medium-sized model Llama 2 could run on-device on these PCs, Dell said.

AI Factory is a Dell-guided environment for AI deployment

Speaking at a news pre-briefing on May 16, Dell Senior Vice President of Product Marketing Sam Grocott pointed out the AI Factory isn’t a single SKU or product; instead, it’s a roadmap of potential products based on the customer’s use case.

Professional services from Dell will now include Microsoft Copilot, Copilot for Sales, Copilot for Security and GitHub Copilot. This partnership is part of an effort to make it easier for customers to discover, validate, plan and design generative AI solutions that attach to the tools and workflows teams already use.

Services for digital assistants are designed “to help customers deliver, in a turnkey fashion, digital assistants wherever it makes sense for their business,” said Dell Senior Vice President of Product Marketing Varun Chhabra.

AI Factory With NVIDIA

Dell also offers, separately, AI Factory With NVIDIA, which uses NVIDIA AI, infrastructure and a high-speed NVIDIA networking fabric. Since first announcing the partnership at NVIDIA GTC in March, Dell has added:

• Accelerator services for retrieval-augmented generation.
• Professional services for digital assistants.
• NVIDIA NIM.
• Automated deployment of NVIDIA solutions.
• Dell PowerEdge.
• Dell NativeEdge.

The accelerator services for RAG “enables developers to experiment with and explore generative AI in a convenient mobile format for easy demonstration within their organizations,” said Chhabra.

SEE: Humans outperform AI on many tasks, Stanford researchers found in a study of AI trends in business. 

AI heads to the edge

Another new manifestation of the Dell/NVIDIA partnership is that NVIDIA Blackwell GPUs are coming to Dell PowerEdge servers. Specifically, the Dell PowerEdge XE9680L server will have eight NVIDIA Blackwell 200 GPUs and direct liquid cooling.

NVIDIA AI Enterprise software is shaking hands with Dell NativeEdge, which will be able to automate the NVIDIA software right in the Dell edge orchestration platform.

Availability dates for the Dell PowerEdge XE9680L server and other edge hardware had not been released at the time of writing.

Expanded partnerships with Hugging Face, Meta and Microsoft

Dell and Hugging Face expanded their partnership with the Dell + Hugging Face Enterprise Hub, a straightforward pathway with which to deploy open source AI models from Hugging Face to Dell infrastructure.

Dell PowerEdge servers built with Meta AI in mind

With Meta, Dell has optimized select PowerEdge servers for Llama 3. The PowerEdge XE9680 in particular has 8GPU support for better performance and safety when running Llama 3. Dell will publish deployment guides for Llama 3, guiding customers on how to deploy and tune the model.

Azure AI comes to Dell APEX Cloud Platform

With Microsoft, Dell is adding Azure AI capabilities on-prem to the Dell APEX Cloud Platform with Microsoft Azure, the automated infrastructure for linking public and private clouds. Organizations will be able to use Azure AI with the same APIs they may already be used to in Azure; this could make it easier for them to use AI vision, translation and speech services, among other services.

PowerStore and Dell APEX receive upgrades

AI was present across other product portfolios, too. Other major announcements from Dell Technologies World included PowerStore Prime, a performance boost and set of new enhancements for the PowerStore all-flash storage platform. PowerStore customers will receive PowerStore Prime through a free software update. PowerStore Prime brings new synchronous replication for file and block, enhancements to the metro volume feature, and custom, reusable policies for data protection.

Dell APEX has received an AI add-on: AIOps. APEX AIOps is an IT operations management tool meant to increase observability in on-premises or multicloud infrastructure, application observability and incident management through artificial intelligence and machine learning. APEX AIOps comes with a chatbot called AIOps Assistant, which can answer questions about every Dell infrastructure product. Dell APEX AIOps is available in Dell APEX Navigator, a service for block and file storage in the public cloud or persistent storage in Kubernetes.

Release dates for the PowerStore and APEX upgrades were not available at the time of writing.

TechRepublic is covering Dell Technologies World 2024 remotely.