Dell Technologies CEO Michael Dell has said that while the demand for artificial intelligence (AI) computing power is currently “tremendous,” the construction of new AI data centres will eventually hit a saturation point. The comments from Dell come days after Amazon founder Jeff Bezos said that humans will start building ‘these giant gigawatt data centres in space’.“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 during CNBC’s “Closing Bell: Overtime.”The hardware maker’s server networking business has seen significant growth, expanding by 58% last year and climbing 69% last quarter, according to the company. Dell’s AI servers, which are powered by Nvidia’s Blackwell Ultra chips, are sold to major customers including cloud provider CoreWeave and Elon Musk’s startup, xAI.
AI’s surging demand meets power constraints
Despite the surging sales—Dell expects to ship $20 billion worth of AI servers in fiscal 2026, doubling last year’s figure—the critical constraint facing the industry is energy supply. Dell confirmed that securing sufficient power is a major hurdle for his customers, including OpenAI.“It’s the clear constraint that we hear about from our customers… 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’”, he noted.“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 concluded.
Jeff Bezos’ prediction on data centres
Recently, Bezos said that humans will make data centres in space because of uninterrupted solar power without the interference of other factors like weather. “We will be able to beat the cost of terrestrial data centers in space in the next couple of decades,” Bezos said. “Space will end up being one of the places that keeps making Earth better. It already has happened with weather satellites. It’s already happened with communication satellites. The next step is going to be data centers and other kinds of manufacturing,” he added.