Artificial intelligence is not just transforming workflows — it’s igniting the next industrial revolution. As enterprises race to adopt AI at scale, the pressure is on to rethink how infrastructure is built, optimized and deployed for a new era of intelligent systems.

Dell’s Jeff Clarke discusses the company’s reworked AI strategy with theCUBE.

For that revolution to happen, however, AI approaches need to be reworked to scale new heights in performance and efficiency. By implementing capabilities such as global supply chain agility, cutting-edge custom clusters and real-world enterprise AI applications, Dell Technologies Inc. is staying ahead of the development curve, according to Jeff Clarke (pictured), chief operating officer and vice chairman of Dell Technologies.

“To be honest, we retooled our engineering capability,” Clarke said. “With AI and this race for technology and deployment, building out clusters that are training these foundational models, we had to go back and reinvent ourselves. We had to go back and rethink engineering workflows because the rate of technology advancement no longer fit into the way that we traditionally built data center products.”

Clarke spoke with theCUBE’s John Furrier and Dave Vellante at Dell Technologies World, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed how Dell Technologies is betting big on AI and backing it with real engineering muscle. (* Disclosure below.)

AI reinvented for the industrial revolution

Dell has fundamentally overhauled its engineering processes to meet the demands of AI workloads. Gone are the days of conventional data center products — Dell now builds AI-specific architectures that scale rapidly, according to Clarke. The company’s new approach enables them to go from customer collaboration to large-scale GPU cluster deployment in under six months. This agility has led to breakthroughs such as being first to market with Nvidia’s GB200 NVL72 and Hopper platforms.

“We’ve committed to engineering to solve these massive solutions problems, because we’re not building a single computer; we’re hooking up lots of computers to act as a single computer and to interact with one another,” Clarke said. “It’s remarkable, these systems, and what they’re capable of.”

Being a custom design house, Dell is, in essence, building some of the largest AI training clusters in the world — and then taking those learnings and scaling them for enterprises of all sizes. The scale of AI’s computational needs for the future is staggering. Estimates project a leap from 25 trillion tokens in 2024 to 35 trillion by 2028, according to Clarke. The sharp uptick is driven by the rise of agentic systems and reasoning engines that multiply demand for compute and data infrastructure.

“The truth is most data is created out in the wild, out in a smart factory, out in a smart hospital, out in a smart city, in your sneakers,” Clarke said. “That’s where data is actually generated. What we see and continue to believe is that the AI migrates to where the data is created to be dealt with.”

This unprecedented surge in data generation is changing the very fabric of enterprise computing. To absorb the data demands from the unfolding industrial revolution, Dell is building what it calls “token factories,” which are hyper-efficient, high-performance compute clusters capable of processing this deluge of data, according to Clarke.

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of Dell Technologies World:

(* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for Dell Technologies World. Neither Dell Technologies Inc., the primary sponsor of theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE