Dell, Nvidia join forces for next-gen generative AI solutions

Dell Technologies is looking to help customers navigate the generative AI landscape with a new portfolio of solutions announced Monday.

The new Dell Generative AI solutions portfolio expands on an initial announcement the company made in May under the name Project Helix, which involves a deep integration with Nvidia. As part of the Dell Generative AI portfolio, the company is announcing new validated designs with Nvidia for helping enterprises deploy AI workloads into production on-premises. 

The second part of the update is a set of professional services to help guide enterprises as they figure out how and where generative AI can be a business benefit. The third part of the update is new Dell Precision workstations that are targeted at data scientists, with the right mix of capabilities to help them build generative AI-powered applications.

In a recent survey by Dell with global decision-makers, 91% of the respondents said they were using generative AI in their lives in some capacity already, and 71% said they were using it for work purposes, according to Varun Chhabra, senior vice president of Dell Infrastructure Solution Group (ISG). Chhabra shared the findings during a press conference.

“It’s very clear in our conversations with customers that there is a unique sense of urgency that organizations of all sizes, verticals and geographies are facing right now in terms of adopting and applying generative AI for the benefit of businesses,” Chhabra said.

Project Helix gets real as Nvidia, Dell put hardware on the table

The infrastructure and services of the Dell Generative AI solutions portfolio are being co-delivered by Dell with Nvidia.

Chhabra said that the new Dell Validated Design for Generative AI with Nvidia offering is the installation of Project Helix which was announced at Dell Technologies World in May. The first release is not a general offering for all AI, it is focused on inferencing use cases.

Conversations with enterprise customers made the urgent needs for AI clear, Chhabra said. He noted that organizations are looking to understand how they can take existing generative AI models that they’ve been either building from scratch or tuning with their own data, scaling them and putting them to work for their businesses. That’s why the Dell/Nvidia design is focused on inferencing.

The Nvidia side of the offering includes Nvidia’s Nemo framework, which has a number of data models for different use cases and industries. The Nvidia Triton Inferencing Server is another essential part of the approach, helping to provide inferencing capabilities for existing AI models. Nvidia GPUs are also part of the hardware infrastructure that integrates Dell servers and infrastructure management capabilities.

There are multiple use cases that Dell sees for generative AI services including software development, content creation, chatbots and virtual assistants.

“With the Dell Validated Design for Generative AI with Nvidia focused on inferencing, customers can start with a prebuilt foundation, instead of investing time and money by trying to do it themselves, testing different infrastructure and having to learn what configurations they need to use,” Chhabra said. “This is really reducing their time to market.”

Looking beyond hardware and software to enable generative AI

With the rapid rise of generative AI, there is also a real need for education and professional services to help organizations adopt the technology.

Chhabra said that enterprises are often at very different stages of understanding and adoption of generative AI. At the earliest stages, there is a need to define a vision for generative AI usage that aligns with an organization’s operations. Dell now has professional services to help with that early stage, which can include workshops for internal stakeholders to define a generative AI vision and identify where they want to start. 

For organizations that already have a strategy for generative AI that is aligned with business objectives, the next step can often be figuring out how actually to build and implement services. To that end, Dell has professional services to help implement and deploy validated designs for inferencing. And finally, for organizations that are further along, Dell has a service to help with scaling up generative AI to meet growing demands.

Looking forward, Chhabra emphasized the new solutions are just getting started with a focus on inferencing and there will be more to come from Dell in the future.

“This is certainly just the start of what we believe will be a long journey in helping our customers with generative AI solutions,” he said.