Dell and NVIDIA Tackle AI's Data Problem with New Platform

SAN JOSE, CA – March 16, 2026 – Dell Technologies, in a significant expansion of its partnership with NVIDIA, today unveiled major advancements to its Dell AI Data Platform. The new capabilities are engineered to automate the entire data lifecycle for artificial intelligence and deliver the extreme storage performance required for the next wave of autonomous AI agents, directly addressing the most persistent barrier to enterprise AI success: data.

For years, businesses have struggled to move AI initiatives from experimental pilots to full-scale production. The primary culprit is often the data itself—trapped in disparate silos, unstructured, ungoverned, and too slow to access. This “data friction” leaves expensive AI infrastructure underutilized and stalls return on investment. With today’s announcement, Dell and NVIDIA are providing a comprehensive, integrated solution designed to eliminate these bottlenecks and create a clear, efficient path to AI-driven value.

From Data Chaos to AI-Ready Datasets

The centerpiece of the new platform is the Dell Data Orchestration Engine, a powerful no-code, low-code solution designed to automate the complex and time-consuming process of data preparation. Powered by technology from Dell’s recent acquisition of AI data management firm Dataloop, the engine orchestrates the complete data lifecycle. It automatically discovers, labels, enriches, and transforms vast quantities of structured and unstructured data into governed, analysis-ready datasets.

By automating these pipelines and integrating active learning with human-in-the-loop workflows, organizations can dramatically reduce data preparation time while continuously improving dataset quality and model accuracy. This directly addresses a critical skills gap, allowing data teams to focus on higher-value tasks rather than manual data wrangling.

Further accelerating this process is the Data Orchestration Engine Marketplace. This curated library allows organizations to deploy production-ready data workflows without building them from scratch. It includes NVIDIA NIM microservices, NVIDIA AI Blueprints, and over 200 other models, applications, and templates, creating a powerful ecosystem for rapid development and deployment.

To democratize data access even further, a new AI Assistant is being integrated into the Dell Data Analytics Engine. This feature provides a conversational natural language interface for SQL analytics, enabling business users without specialized coding knowledge to query, visualize, and collaborate on governed data. This is particularly crucial for enabling autonomous AI agents that need to independently access and reason with structured business data to perform tasks.

Unleashing Extreme Performance to Keep GPUs Fed

As AI models grow in complexity, the demand for data throughput has skyrocketed, making storage the new critical constraint. Traditional storage architectures often fail to keep pace, creating I/O bottlenecks that leave costly GPUs idle. Dell’s new AI-optimized storage innovations are purpose-built to solve this problem with architectures that maintain extreme performance at massive scale.

Leading the charge is the Dell Lightning File System, which Dell touts as the world's fastest parallel file system. It is engineered to deliver extreme performance density, with claims of up to 150 GB/second of throughput per rack. Internal testing suggests it can deliver up to 20 times greater performance than traditional flash-only scale-out file systems, ensuring that even the most demanding AI training and inference workloads are continuously fed with data.

Complementing this is Dell Exascale Storage, a flexible 3-in-1 platform that allows IT teams to deploy Dell's file, object, and parallel file system software on a common hardware foundation of PowerEdge servers. With read performance targeted at up to 6 TB/second per rack and support for networking up to 800GbE, Exascale Storage is designed for the most demanding AI and high-performance computing (HPC) environments, from high-frequency trading to multimodal AI.

A Deep Partnership with NVIDIA's Full Stack

The enhanced platform is a testament to the deepening collaboration between Dell and NVIDIA, integrating NVIDIA's full stack of AI hardware and software. Dell announced it will support all of NVIDIA's latest innovations, creating a deeply integrated and optimized ecosystem for enterprise AI.

This includes support for the NVIDIA AI-Q blueprint, an open-source framework for building customizable and scalable AI agents. By integrating NVIDIA-accelerated data engines, the Dell AI Data Platform enables high-performance data preparation, retrieval, and reasoning pipelines essential for these advanced agents. Customers also gain access to a library of pre-built NVIDIA blueprints, NIM microservices for rapid deployment, and the powerful NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Super model on the Dell Enterprise Hub on Hugging Face.

GPU acceleration is also being brought directly into the data platform layer with the introduction of NVIDIA RTX PRO Blackwell Server Edition GPUs. These will work alongside NVIDIA CUDA-X libraries to accelerate both structured data processing and unstructured vector indexing, promising up to 3x faster SQL queries and 12x faster vector indexing compared to traditional methods. This ensures more responsive AI applications and greater infrastructure efficiency.

“The number one problem enterprises face when moving AI pilots to production is curating the data they already have and putting it to work,” said Travis Vigil, senior vice president, ISG Product Management, Dell Technologies. “The Dell AI Data Platform with NVIDIA automates the entire data lifecycle and delivers the speed and scale AI workloads demand. We've done the integration work, so customers deploy faster, scale with confidence and see real returns.”

Proving the ROI: From Pilot to Production

Marking the two-year anniversary of the Dell AI Factory with NVIDIA, this announcement builds on a strategy that is already demonstrating tangible results. With over 4,000 customers, the Dell AI Factory has established a proven track record, and a study commissioned by Dell found that early adopters are seeing up to a 2.6x return on investment within the first year.

This ROI is driven by creating an end-to-end, integrated solution that simplifies deployment and management at scale. By tackling the foundational data challenges, Dell and NVIDIA are enabling enterprises to move beyond experimentation and unlock measurable business outcomes from their AI investments.

“The shift to autonomous agents requires a fundamentally different approach to data infrastructure, with automated orchestration, AI-native storage and GPU-optimized performance architected to work together,” said Jason Hardy, vice president, Storage Technologies, NVIDIA. “Dell's enterprise expertise, combined with full-stack NVIDIA AI infrastructure, creates the foundation organizations need to deploy AI at scale.”

The new features and products will have a staggered rollout, with the Dell Data Orchestration Engine available in the first quarter of 2026, the Dell Lightning File System in April 2026, and other key components becoming available throughout the year.