“The risk is not the cloud. The risk is losing control of your data, your cost, your security, your intellectual property, and your speed,” said Michael Dell in his keynote address at Dell Technologies World 2026.

With AI now the operating model for the modern enterprise, there were several big announcements made at Dell Technologies World 2026 in Las Vegas. Michael Dell, Chairman and CEO of Dell Technologies, highlighted the continuous demand for on-premises AI infrastructure globally as businesses continue to invest in AI to boost their business outcomes.

“We understand how AI-led companies work, how they operate, what they look like, and what they’re truly capable of. This is an existential moment. The companies that redesign their work around AI are going to compound advantages faster. And every leader in this room feels that pressure right now. It’s exciting. It’s exhilarating. It’s sometimes exhausting. But it’s also unavoidable. And I want you to know that you’re not alone. We are by your side with the expertise, the bold supply chain, and the execution to deliver when it matters,” Dell said.

While the demand for AI has increased, the challenge some organizations are facing is now delivering secure AI that meets the needs of compliance and regulatory requirements in the country’s they operate in. In Asia, sovereign AI needs are seeing an increase in local data center growth to support data governance.

According to Dell, a recent Dell Technologies survey of AI factories shows that 67% of AI workloads run on-premises, on-device or at the Edge. Also, 88% of respondents are running at least one AI workload on premises while CIOs are aggressively pivoting to hybrid AI.

“The risk is not the cloud. The risk is losing control of your data, your cost, your security, your intellectual property, and your speed. In the ancient era, lock-in did more than slow innovation. It actually limits what your company can do. Assume every company will deploy fleets of agents, imposing workflows on the infrastructure they control. It’s estimated that worldwide AI infrastructure spending could hit US$3-4 trillion by 2030. AI is fueling a renaissance in enterprise hardware. A shift from bits back to atoms. The question is, how do you deploy the world’s best models where you need them, with security and governance built in? We give you model choice without infrastructure chaos,” said Dell.

As such, the Dell Enterprise Hub on Hugging Face gives enterprises on-premises access to a curated collection of the latest open-weight models, including MiniMax-M2.7, DeepSeek Pro, DeepSeek V4, GLM 5.1 and Kimi K2.6, optimized for Dell AI Factory infrastructure. As the industry moves toward highly efficient architectures delivering frontier-level reasoning at long context lengths, this collaboration shifts the tokenomics of enterprise AI, giving organizations a trusted, more secure path to deploy the most capable open models where their data lives, at a fraction of the cost.

“You’ll be able to bring the latest frontier models to your enterprise data on the Dell AI Factory. Google and Dell are bringing the Google Distributed Cloud with the Gemini 3 models on-prem with the PowerEdge XE9780 servers. You can drive a new computing environment using the new Gemini models. And OpenAI and Dell Technologies are building a solution based on OpenAI’s codecs to bring their latest agentic harness on-prem with the context provided by our Dell AI data platform using a set of connectors and skills. You can securely connect to the latest GPT 5.5 and GPT codecs models,” Dell said.

Other models available include Palantir’s Foundry and AIP platform as well as Refelction’s open-source frontier AI models coming on-premises to the Dell AI Factory, allowing enterprises and sovereign entities to connect all their data sources across their enterprise, define and dynamically manage relationships between those data sources withing organization boundaries.

In addition, ServiceNow customers will be able to leverage the Dell AI Factory to bring together infrastructure and enterprise workflow automation, enabling organizations to discover, govern, and operationalize AI focused on business outcomes.

Advancements to the Dell AI Factory with NVIDIA

Having a fully controlled environment to deploy AI is what regulated industries, including governments and sovereign entities, are looking at today. For businesses, running hybrid AI also ensures there is sufficient data visibility.

For Dell, with AI now becoming a strategic asset, delivering secure, air-gapped, nation-scale AI infrastructure without pocketing and without forcing “data into somebody else’s black box” is key.

“AI can become the most concentrated technology in history, or it can become the most democratizing technology in history. We are choosing democratizing. Powerful AI, wherever it’s needed, open, secure, and yours. This is hybrid AI. It’s not a compromise. It’s a competitive advantage running on your Dell AI Factory. Now, how big is the demand for intelligence? It may very well be the largest market that’s ever created,” Dell said.

By 2030, token consumption is expected to increase by 3400%. With organizations scaling AI workloads, Dell believes there is a new economic reality where cost curves, compute demands, and data movement patterns are all being rewritten.

“AI is not just changing technology, it’s changing the economics of technology in favor of enterprise infrastructure. And now is the time to decide how you can most cost-effectively generate the tokens that you’re going to need for the long term. We now have 5,000 customers running their Dell AI workloads on Dell AI Factory, turning their AI admission into scale production,” he added.

The next stage is the deployment of agentic AI, which Dell pointed out is not something that companies can’t bolt onto their legacy systems to get optimal results. At the same time, as agentic AI workloads grow in complexity, cloud costs are becoming increasingly unpredictable. Organizations are seeking a more controlled approach to deploying autonomous AI where performance, data sovereignty, and cost efficiency are paramount.

Dell Deskside Agentic AI deals with this. Unveiled at DTW 2026, the new solution powered by Dell’s high-performance workstations and NVIDIA NemoClaw, allows enterprises to more securely build and run autonomous agents locally with data that never leaves the device. Supported by end-to-end Dell services, the solution is designed for specialized groups in software engineering, academic research and regulated industries, converting variable cloud token costs into a controlled infrastructure investment.

Also announced was the availability of NVIDIA OpenShell, the secure runtime for autonomous agents, across the entire Dell AI Factory with NVIDIA. This allows organizations to build, deploy and govern agents with privacy controls, from Dell Pro Precision towers and Dell Pro Max with GB10 and GB300 through to Dell PowerEdge XE servers. The Dell-NVIDIA AI-Q 2.0 Reference Architecture, powered by the Dell AI Data Platform with NVIDIA, extends this foundation with a production-ready multi-agent research workflow for regulated industries.

Securing agents

As Ai agents are digital workers, they have memory, credentials, access, and the ability to take action. For Dell, this requires new architecture for the work itself as agents have trusted data and government action and infrastructure close enough to be able to make real-time decisions.

“The old systems and processes and patient situations in the past are no longer enough. And it is time to completely rethink and reimagine your company’s workflows for agentic automation and for recursive self-improvement,” he said.

With AI agents having credentials, access and autonomy, Dell believes that security must expand beyond human users to also govern the non-human workers operating at machine speed.

“If a bad actor can influence an agent or if an agent is trained on bad data, the blast radius is no longer contained to just a single system. It can propagate across all of your workflows and your infrastructure and in fact the business itself. This is already changing the boardroom conversation. It’s not just are you secure, but do you understand what your systems are doing on your behalf? You can’t protect what you can’t see and you can’t manage. So we can do visibility control no matter how fast these threats evolve. Zero trust principles keep you adaptive and resilient and are built in from the endpoint to the core,” Dell added.

This is where Dell’s Trusted Device Platform comes in. It can store key credentials that only authorized identities, whether they’re human or machine, have access to systems.

“Agentic AI is only as good as the data that it can trust, access, and act on. And if your data is siloed, your agents are blind. They can’t deliver the value that you expect. Everyone has access to the same models. The differentiator is your data, the unique proprietary hard-won knowledge inside your business. The agents are hungry for your data. Now imagine tens of thousands of them, going to billions of them, running 24-7, thousands of times faster than any person. The Dell AI Data Platform with NVIDIA has been engineered to address the data bottleneck,” Dell said.

As AI factories need AI-grade networks, the new PowerSwitch Spectrum 6 from Dell Technologies gives customers the massive scale, speed, and efficiency and reliability required for AI. Dell has also added the NVIDIA VoltaMX 800 liquid-cooled with co-packaged optics to the networking solution.

As storage and networking feeds the beast of accelerated computing, the PowerEdge XE 9812 built on NVIDIA’s Vera-Gripen NVL72 delivers 10 times lower cost per token than BlackBell for massive scale, egentic AI efficiency. The new PowerEdge XE servers built with NVIDIA HDX-driven NVL8 are an industry leader, supporting up to 144 GPUs per rack with 100% directly cooled computer nodes, 5.5 times more powerful than the previous B200 GPUs.

“And to bring it all together, we’re excited to announce Dell PowerRack, a turnkey rack solution where the AI compute, the networking, and the storage are all engineered together, designed, tested, validated, and delivered as one system. With PowerRack, you can deploy a fully integrated system where the thermal design, the power management, and all the software have been engineered and tested to work perfectly as one,” Dell said.