LAS VEGAS, United States - Dell Technologies showcased its strong artificial intelligence (AI) cooperation with Nvidia. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang (젠슨 황) made a surprise appearance during a keynote speech by Michael Dell (마이클 델), chairman and CEO of Dell Technologies, lending weight to the companies' AI Factory alliance.

Dell Technologies on May 18 local time unveiled updates to the "Nvidia-based Dell AI Factory" during the first-day keynote at Dell Technologies World 2026 (DTW 2026) in Las Vegas. It outlined a plan spanning computing, networking, storage, software and services to link corporate AI adoption to tangible business results.

Huang: "We have reached an era of useful AI for the first time"

The highlight of the keynote was Huang's appearance. Attendees responded with loud cheers when Huang, who had been expected to take part by video, walked onto the stage. Dell introduced Huang as "a great partner and friend, a true leader and visionary of the AI era."

After shaking hands with Dell, Huang stressed that generative AI is evolving into agentic AI. He said AI is moving beyond simply generating content to an agentic AI era in which it supports work using multiple tools. "Generative AI can not only create content, but also lead to reasoning and planning," Huang said. "Now we have, for the first time, truly useful AI," he said.

Huang said agentic AI is also rapidly increasing corporate demand for AI because it repeats a process of checking results and then making better plans. "Compared with simply answering a question, the required computing has increased by 100 times and 1,000 times," he said. "Some software programming tasks can get done what a team would need a month to do," he said.

Dell AI Factory upgrade supports building autonomous agents

Huang emphasised that AI is also changing how companies work. He said the use of AI agents has spread across internal operations such as software development and quality control. "Today, a great engineer works with agents," he said. "A truly outstanding engineer of the future will orchestrate multiple agents," he said.

Dell upgraded its Nvidia-based Dell AI Factory in line with the agentic AI trend that Huang emphasised. Dell AI Factory is a portfolio designed to help companies build AI safely and scale it for their purposes based on reliable data and controllable infrastructure.

Dell also introduced "Dell Desk-side Agentic AI," which enables the operation of autonomous AI agents in a local environment. The solution, based on Dell high-performance workstations and Nvidia NIM microservices, supports companies in safely running AI agents without exporting data externally. Nvidia OpenShell, a secure runtime for autonomous AI agents, will also be applied across the Dell AI Factory.

AI data platform to help expand corporate business

Dell is also focusing on converting corporate data into assets suitable for AI use. It strengthened orchestration and search functions of the Dell AI Data Platform to index billions of unstructured files and connect them to governance-based data pipelines. The Starburst-based Dell Data Analytics Engine provides up to 6 times faster structured query language (SQL) query performance on Nvidia Blackwell graphics processing units (GPUs). It also plans to support the Nvidia Vera platform in the future.

As next-generation infrastructure, "Dell PowerRack" drew attention. Dell PowerRack is a rack-unit solution designed as an integrated system for computing, networking and storage. A newly announced "Dell AI Ecosystem Program" supports AI software companies in validating their solutions on Dell AI Factory infrastructure. Dell plans to work with Google, OpenAI and Palantir, among others, to broaden enterprise AI use cases in both on-premises and hybrid environments.

At the end of the keynote, Huang signed a Dell PowerRack product to underscore the companies' close cooperation. "As the agentic AI era arrives in earnest, enterprise AI adoption is entering a phase of explosive growth," he said. "Dell and Nvidia are jointly building a scalable full-stack AI factory from desktops to data centres," he said.

"Dell Technologies is helping customers turn data into fuel for AI on infrastructure where they can directly control security, governance and cost efficiency," Dell said. "We value the amazing partnership with Nvidia and everything we have done together for customers," he said.