Michael Dell’s Boldest AI Predictions From Dell Technologies World 2025

"AI will follow the data and not the other way around,” said Dell founder, Chairman and CEO Michael Dell, adding that 85 percent of enterprises plan to move generative AI workloads on-premises within 24 months.

No one is a bigger champion for AI’s change-making capabilities than Dell Technologies founder, Chairman and CEO Michael Dell, who sees a future in which AI workloads will not be siloed in data centers or the cloud but created and processed at the edge and on- premises.

“AI will follow the data not the other way around,’ he told the audience at Dell Technologies World 2025. “The future of AI will be decentralized, low latency and hyper efficient, and that’s why Dell is pioneering the edge AI revolution, bringing real-time intelligence to wherever the data lives.”

Until that day arrives, however, Dell is equipping the largest AI infrastructure deployments on the planet with its server and storage arrays.

“We’re creating a future where intelligence amplifies human potential at a massive scale,” he told the audience. “The world’s most advanced intelligence factories are right here.”

He name-checked some of Dell’s largest deployments to date, which include xAI’s Colosus and vendors CoreWeave, ServiceNow, Mistral and G42.

Dell acknowledged that these factories require massive amounts of material and energy in order to operate.

For one large customer, it takes six miles of water piping to circulate 100,000 gallons of water through 77 miles of tubing. That tubing is snaked through 110,000 GPUs housed in 2,800 racks wired by 6,000 network switches bound together with 27,000 miles of network cables—enough cable to tie it once around the earth.

“And systems are being planned right now that will scale to a million GPUs and beyond,” he told the crowd. xAI has stated that number as its own goal, and Dell has been an early supplier of servers and storage to the company.

“We just love these customers who push our engineering and our innovation to the edge, but these are companies that are in the business of pure intelligence. For most of us, the reality is a little different. You don’t need your own Colossus, but you do need AI.”

Dell is taking all the lessons learned from deploying these massive systems and using them to power smaller ambitions in retail, manufacturing, health care and science.

“You worry that the engine of progress is pulling away and you worry about being left behind and about how or when to jump on it,” he said. “I get it, and that’s OK. That’s why we’re all here. We’re here to share our experiences and to help you get on board. Dell tech is full of on-ramps, and the real danger is standing still. So let’s keep moving.”

Here are Dell’s boldest AI predictions from his Dell Technologies World 2025 keynote.

Dell Is Ready For Windows 10 End Of Life

“Personal productivity is being reinvented by AI. The installed base of a billion and a half PCS is aging, and it's being replaced with AI innovation”

“The Windows 10 end of life is coming, and we are ready. Dell is the leader in commercial AI PCs, and we're further distancing ourselves from the competition.

“We've simplified our portfolio and made it easy for you to choose the right system for you, and we give you the choice of the latest from Nvidia, Intel, AMD and Qualcomm.

“Today’s PCs are becoming AI workstations, blazing-fast all-day battery life powered by NPU and GPU innovation for developers and scientists.

“Our Dell Pro Max with Nvidia GB300 delivers up to 20 petaflops of performance and 800 gigs of memory that's enough to run and train models with 1 trillion parameters right under your desk. AI is moving out of the cloud onto the edge, bringing intelligence to every device in every location in real time.”

The AI Data Center Revolution

“Just as AI is revolutionizing the PC, it’s revolutionizing traditional data centers.”

“First up, AI is driving consolidation to free up as much space and as much power and energy as possible. Second, as you consolidate, you need to rearchitect.

“Disaggregated architecture is open, automated pools of compute, networking and storage. It combines the flexibility of three tier swith the simplicity of hyperconverged to run any workload anywhere.

“Our disaggregated solutions are built with the industry’s best components, where we lead the industry. First up, compute. Our 17th generation PowerEdge supports your most challenging workloads and has a 7-to-1 replacement ratio over previous generations.

“And with the OpenManage system, you can get automated intelligence and maximum efficiency, and you can free up space and power for those AI workloads with great ROI. And we connect it all with lightning-fast Dell networking to feed those data-hungry GPUs and deliver rea- time intelligence from massive data sets.”

‘We Love Storage At Dell’

“Today, 80 percent of data is in cold storage, but you can imagine a world in the not- too-distant future where data moves to warm and hot tiers, constantly in circulation, with thousands of multi-agent systems transforming millions of tasks from the data center to the edge.”

“We love storage at Dell. PowerStore is the leading intelligent, all-flash enterprise solution. It’s AI-driven, automated and the perfect choice for disaggregated architecture.

“More than 17,000 customers have chosen PowerStore as a cornerstone for their data center. With industry-leading deduplication and compression, these customers have saved more than 8 exabytes of capacity, along with the power and space that comes with it.

“Now on to PowerScale, this is distributed file object storage for unstructured data—that’s the fastest-growing kind—at any scale from terabytes to petabytes. It’s secure. It’s efficient. It’s fast, and it’s ideal for AI and large-scale analytics.

“Next up, PowerFlex, the latest software-defined architecture with extreme efficiency to manage traditional and modern workloads. All of our infrastructure is designed from the ground up to be the most secure in the industry, and with PowerProtect you can achieve cyber resiliency by securing your data, responding to threats and ultimately recovering from attacks.”

AI Is Not Here To Replace, But To Collaborate

“We are entering the age of ubiquitous intelligence, where AI becomes as essential as electricity. With AI, you can distill years of experience into instant insights, speeding up decisions and uncovering patterns in massive data.”

“It’s not here to replace humans. AI is a collaborator that frees your teams to do what they do best, to innovate, to imagine and to solve the world’s toughest problems. And Dell is the infrastructure—the backbone enabling enterprises to think faster, to act smarter and to dream bigger.

“Last year at Dell Technologies World, we introduced a new kind of factory that produces intelligence, and today we have now more than 3,000 customers running Dell AI factories with a lot of success.

“The Dell AI Factory is up to 60 percent more cost-effective than the public cloud, and recent studies indicate that about three-fourths of AI initiatives are meeting or exceeding expectations. That means driving ROI and productivity gains from 20 percent up to 40 percent and in some cases more.

“Now with agents and test time compute and deep reasoning, the models are helping us think, and they’re thinking and acting on their own with autonomy. ”

Dell Will Make AI More Accessible For All

“We will soon see the world invest more than $1 trillion in AI to ensure the prosperity of nations and industries alike.

“That is a well-justified investment, given that the knowledge economy drives more than half of global GDP, and AI is the operating system that will power the world forward, adding an estimated $15 trillion to the global economy by 2030.

“But for AI to reach its economic potential, adoption has to broaden, and our job at Dell Technologies is to make AI more accessible for all of you.

“Eighty-five percent of enterprises plan to move generative AI workloads on-premises in the next 24 months.

“We’re developing AI for the enterprise, delivering end-to-end solutions with the right infrastructure at the right scale for every use case across every industry, and with the pace of innovation that’s occurring, I think the number of Dell AI factories is going to grow from thousands today to millions in the years ahead.”