Table of Contents
Michael Dell said his company’s server and networking business surged 58% last year and grew another 69% in the last quarter
In sum – what to know:
Explosive demand – “tremendous” need for compute power, says Dell, with AI-related server sales set to double in fiscal 2026.
Overbuild scenario – “at some point there’ll be too many” data centers, he says also – although current demand still far exceeds capacity.
Global demand for computing power continues to surge, fueling an unprecedented boom in artificial intelligence (AI) data centers that shows no signs of slowing — though a saturation point will eventually come in the future, according to Dell Technologies chairman Michael Dell.
“I’m sure at some point there’ll be too many of these things built, but we don’t see any signs of that,” Dell said in an interview with a CNBC TV show. He said his company’s server and networking business surged 58% last year and grew another 69% in the last quarter, underscoring the rapid pace of AI-related infrastructure build-outs.
Dell’s AI servers rely on Nvidia’s Blackwell Ultra chips and are sold to clients such as CoreWeave and xAI, Elon Musk’s AI venture. The company plans to ship $20 billion worth of AI servers in fiscal 2026, double the figure from last year.
During the interview, Dell also highlighted a growing constraint in the AI data center field: power availability. “It’s the clear constraint that we hear about from our customers, including OpenAI,” he said. “Many customers, in fact, will tell us, ‘Well, don’t deliver it until this day because we won’t have power in the building to support it.’”
Dell emphasized that while his company can make servers as energy-efficient as possible, the scale of AI ambitions will require massive power resources that may not yet be available. Data from the Energy Information Administration (EIA) shows that 63 gigawatts of new capacity are expected to be added to the U.S. power grid in 2025.
“At the end of the day, if you’re going to generate tens of trillions of tokens, and you’re going to create intelligence and drive the economy forward, you’re going to need computing power and energy,” Dell said.
OpenAI announced a partnership with Nvidia in September to build at least 10 gigawatts of data centers. That is approximately the equivalent to the annual power consumption of 8 million U.S. households, according to a CNBC analysis of data from the EIA.
