A majority enterprise data will soon live at the edge — and Dell Technologies wants to be where that data lives. At Dell Technologies World 2025 in Las Vegas, company founder and Chief Executive Officer Michael Dell opened his keynote with an illustration of how 75% of enterprise data will soon be live and processed at the edge.

AI is driving this transformation and fueling the emergence of edge computing as the backbone of next-generation infrastructure. As enterprises move from centralized to distributed architectures, hardware and software will need to adapt accordingly. It is an evolution that Dell (pictured) has seen before in his decades of experience in this fast-moving industry.

Michael Dell discusses the future of AI and computing with theCUBE’s John Furrier and Dave Vellante.

“If we dial back the clock of computing 30 years, there’s always these debates on, where is the power going to be?” he said. “Where is the intelligence going to be? Is it going to be at the center? Is it going to be out there on the edge? What’s the answer? It’s both. It’s always both.”

Dell spoke with theCUBE’s John Furrier and Dave Vellante at Dell Technologies World, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. TheCUBE’s coverage featured on-site reporting and exclusive interviews with Dell executives, data platform experts, systems leaders, analysts and investors to discuss AI infrastructure and Dell’s evolving platform vision for enterprise computing. (* Disclosure below.)

Here’s theCUBE’s complete interview with Michael Dell:

Plus, here’s three key insights you may have missed from theCUBE’s coverage:

Insight #1: Adoption of the AI Factory is fueling an infrastructure renaissance.

The “AI factory era” is driving a move toward large-scale systems that support reasoning, training and inference at scale. As Dell continues to pursue various initiatives involving the AI Factory, this is leading to new solutions that enable enterprises to move faster by consuming already-existing technologies rather than inventing them.

Dell’s John Roese talks with theCUBE about AI evolution, during Dell Technologies World.

An example of this can be seen in a collaboration between Dell and Cohere Inc. that was announced earlier this month, and discussed by John Roese, Dell’s CTO of products and operations, during an interview with theCUBE.

“Once you have an AI Factory, what do you run on it?” Roese asked. “Cohere is a great example. That’s not an AI Factory; that’s the workload you run on the AI Factory. Now you can consume it kind of as an appliance. It’s standardized. Coding assistants are heading in that direction.”

Here’s theCUBE’s complete interview with John Roese:

During their coverage of the conference, theCUBE’s analysts talked about how Dell is betting big on decentralized infrastructure, where data will be generated closer to where it is created in environments such as retail stores or hospitals. This will lead to greater democratization of AI by Dell’s customers, as noted by theCUBE’s analyst John Furrier in his discussion of Michael Dell’s opening keynote remarks.

“They’ve got the huge AI factories,” Furrier said. “They want to democratize AI from colossus to the edge — colossus meaning a big, large thing. Not everyone needs that. Not everyone needs to be a hyperscaler is what [Michael Dell is] saying.”

Here’s theCUBE’s keynote analysis from John Furrier and Dave Vellante:

The AI factory is also changing how enterprises will rely on storage, requiring an ability to provide knowledge and manage data relationships to rapidly respond to queries. Developers don’t want to have to build new capabilities for semantic search, so this will become a part of Dell’s hardware solution.

“Enterprises are moving from [central processing unit]-powered enterprise operations to [graphics processing unit]-enterprise operations … because of LLMs and agentic AI,” said Kari Briski, vice president of generative AI software for enterprise at Nvidia, during a conversation with theCUBE. “When you’re working with these enterprise systems, you need agents that can perceive and understand the tools that they have access to. These storage servers are going to have to be semantic storage servers.”

Here’s theCUBE’s complete interview with Kari Briski, who was joined by Varun Chhabra, senior vice president of product marketing, Infrastructure Solutions Group and Telecom, at Dell:

Insight #2: Wherever enterprise data resides, AI will find it.

The amount of data for AI’s computational needs is massive. Jeff Clarke, chief operating officer and vice chairman of Dell, told theCUBE that estimates project a leap from 25 trillion tokens last year to 35 trillion by 2028.

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

This means that data, increasingly generated at the edge, will remain where it resides and AI will have to be delivered to multiple locations.

“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.”

Here’s theCUBE’s complete interview with Jeff Clarke:

Because data will be distributed across environments, Dell is designing its architecture to provide full-stack solutions for multicloud and hybrid ecosystems. The company’s partnership with Microsoft Corp. provides insight into this strategy, with Dell’s implementation of Cloud Platform on Azure.

“We really want to bring AI to the data,” said Kenny Lowe, technical staff, cloud platforms evangelism and enablement lead at Dell, during an interview on theCUBE. “But the data is going to live in different places. We are bringing, for example Dell PowerScale to the Azure Cloud so people can have their unstructured data running in Azure and use Azure services on top of that. We can have that consistently running on-premises as well.”

Here’s theCUBE’s complete interview with Kenny Lowe, who was joined by Jeff Woolsey, principal program manager at Microsoft:

The PC side of Dell’s business also exemplifies how AI is being delivered to data at the edge. Dell’s AI PC offerings are facilitating a move toward building intelligent workflows in-house for customers such as USAA, as Jon Siegal, senior vice president of portfolio marketing at Dell, described in an appearance on theCUBE.

“We’re seeing a lot of customers now start to investigate building their own models and their own AI applications, because we’re seeing that’s where a lot of the true value is going to be with AI and the enterprise,” Siegal said. “We’re helping a number of companies out there today, and USAA is one of them, to help build these new AI applications and make sure that when they do it, they can do it once and deploy it across an AI fleet of PCs.”

Here’s theCUBE’s complete interview with Jon Siegal, who was joined by Rob Johnson, assistant vice president of information security at USAA:

Insight #3: Agentic AI is redefining the use of APIs and the meaning of digital workers.

Application programming interfaces provide the rules and specifications that enable software programs to communicate with each other. API endpoints are becoming more significant in agentic AI, enabling businesses to build and implement AI-based workflows across diverse environments.

Intel’s Ajay Mungara and Chris Branch talk to theCUBE about agentic workflows.

“The reason why I’m excited around agentic and this API endpoint thing is because in the past everybody had to develop on the silicon itself, and it was complicated. It took forever,” said Chris Branch, AI strategy sales manager at Intel, in a discussion with theCUBE. “With the agentic workflow combined with APIs, what you can do then is have a dashboard that runs multiple models simultaneously. What that agentic workflow with these APIs allows is for companies to run those on different systems at different times in different locations without changing any of their code.”

Here’s theCUBE’s complete interview with Chris Branch, who was joined by Ajay Mungara, senior director of developer products and ecosystem — data center and AI at Intel:

Intelligent agents are also transforming the concept of a digital worker. Agents are not merely extensions of software programming; they can be proactive digital assistants in the completion of key work tasks. This is part of the approach taken by Microsoft with its Copilot offering, where agents can become a vital support layer for digital collaboration and empowerment.

“It’s there to be your companion, help you get through the drudgery of work,” said Grant Duke, director of Windows commercial business development for Dell at Microsoft, in an interview during the event. “Then it migrates into this concept of agentic … brings in the capabilities where an agent will become, think of it like a digital employee, a resource in your environment.”

Here’s theCUBE’s complete interview with Grant Duke, who was joined by Lisa Schaub, U.S. Dell channel executive at Microsoft:

A key element in the deployment of agentic AI involves enablement, providing employees with the time and support to integrate these digital tools into workflows. This has led to conversations about the nature of agents themselves and a reexamination of management structures and data governance, according to Carolina Milanesi, president and principal analyst at Creative Strategies Inc., who spoke with theCUBE.

“Whether or not you want to talk about it in terms of digital employee or not is a different story,” she said. “Or, if you’re even thinking it is a task and it is a work to be done, is that work done outside your organization? That has implications on your data and your IP. It’s quite interesting how people are navigating this and not making it easier.”

Here’s theCUBE’s complete interview with Carolina Milanesi, who was joined by Bob O’Donnell, president and chief analyst at TECHnalysis Research LLC:

To watch more of theCUBE’s coverage of Dell Technologies World, here’s our complete event video playlist:

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

Photo: SiliconANGLE