The Dell PowerEdge XE9680 GPU-enabled AI server is the “quickest ramping” new resolution within the firm’s historical past, COO Jeff Clarke mentioned
After laying out a strong synthetic intelligence (AI) technique masking infrastructure and providers throughout its companies throughout Dell Applied sciences World in April, firm COO Jeff Clarke this week mentioned AI “is a powerful tailwind for all issues information and compute,” on a This autumn fiscal yr 2024 earnings name. “AI is increasing the TAM for whole know-how spending and is projected to develop at a 19% CAGR for the following couple of years to roughly $90 billion, together with {hardware} and providers.”
For its second quarter, Dell reported income of $22.9 billion, up 10% sequentially and down 13% year-over-year. Working earnings was $1.2 billion, down 8% sequentially and up 1% year-over-year.
To the AI level, Clarke mentioned that in Q2 Dell noticed robust demand for its PowerEdge XE9680 GPU-enabled server which he referred to as a “key aspect” to the corporate’s generative AI options. He mentioned AI service elevated to twenty% of servers order income within the first half of the fiscal yr. He additionally referred to as out $2 billion in backlogged orders for the XE9680 “and our gross sales pipeline is considerably greater.”
“Gen AI represents an inflection level driving basic change within the tempo of innovation whereas bettering the shopper expectation and enabling vital productiveness features and new methods to work,” Clarke mentioned. “Because the primary infrastructure supplier, we’re clearly positioned to serve the market in a singular and differentiated manner. And now we have the world’s broadest Gen AI infrastructure portfolio that spans from the cloud to the shopper….I like our hand.”
Highlighting the AI use circumstances prospects appear centered on, Clarke talked about buyer operations, content material creation and administration, software program growth and gross sales.
Clarke reiterated Dell’s robust outlook for AI on condition that related workloads have to run throughout PCs, information facilities and edge clouds, which means Dell can assist the proliferation of AI throughout its portfolio. He additionally hit on one other key level which is that generative AI will depend on massive language fashions which can be educated utilizing proprietary, domain-specific information, and optimized in service of very particular enterprise processes.
Extra on the AI alternative: “We predict it’s one measurement doesn’t match all. We predict there’s a complete slew of AI options, once more, from PC to workstations to what occurs I the info heart—and the info heart may very well be a single server working inference on the edge…We consider it’s incremental.”
In response to a query that was partially concerning the sorts of firms shopping for Dell’s AI options, Clarke tied it to the prevalence of multi-cloud architectures and mentioned, primarily, AI workloads will comply with the info. “It’s extremely unlikely you’re going to have a wise manufacturing unit or a wise hospital or a set of robots which can be going to repeatedly look to be educated or run inference a great distance away. Latency will matter. We predict safety will matter. We predict efficiency will matter. And we in the end assume value will matter. Whenever you put that equation collectively, we predict it’s going to be a hybrid world…We predict it’s going to be very, very heterogeneous in the way in which that this shall be performed with basic compute in addition to accelerated compute. In a nutshell, that’s what we consider the chance.”
