Dell has announced a number of updates to its server, storage, and networking offerings to better support organizations looking to scale AI deployments.

In a statement, the company said the updates to its PowerEdge, PowerScale, and ObjectScale solutions will help boost performance, scalability, and data discovery capabilities.

Deepening its partnership with Nvidia, Dell has launched the PowerEdge XE8712 server, which the company claims will deliver the industry’s “highest GPU density in a standard rack,” with up to 144 Blackwell GPUs per Dell IR7000 rack. Available to customers from December, the XE8712 also features Dell’s Integrated Dell Remote Access Controller (iDRAC) monitoring software, OpenManage Enterprise (OME), and the Integrated Rack Controller (IRC) for advanced thermal controls.

Dell also unveiled its PowerEdge R770AP server, featuring Intel Xeon 6 P-core 6900-series servers. Also available from December, it features enhanced parallel processing, reduced memory latency, and increased PCIe lanes to support accelerated trading algorithms, scalable memory configurations, and improved network performance.

The air-cooled offering features high-core-count CPUs, large cache sizes, and support for CXL memory expansion, and will sit alongside Dell’s PowerEdge XE9785 and XE9785L rack-scale systems, launched in May 2025 and purpose-built for next-generation AI and HPC workloads.

The 10U XE9785 is also air-cooled, while the 30U XE9785L features direct liquid-cooling technology. Both offerings comprise dual-socket AMD Epyc processors and eight AMD Instinct MI355X GPUs per node. Combined with AMD Pensando Pollara 400 AI NICs and the Dell PowerSwitch AI fabric, Dell said the servers will deliver scalable compute, improved TCO, and reduced operational costs.

Speaking to DCD at this year’s Supercomputing conference in St. Louis, Missouri, David Schmidt, senior director of compute systems and software at Dell said the company was “really excited” about the R770AP because it has customers that are looking to use their 19-inch infrastructure to support CPU-based AI workloads in addition to some traditional high-performance computing (HPC) workloads in Dell’s traditional air-cooled server racks.

For hardware deployments that can’t be air-cooled – and with an understanding that chip density is going to keep increasing with every new release from the major players in the chip market – Schmidt said Dell is taking all of that into consideration when it comes to designing its rack-scale solutions.

“We built the IR7000 with exactly that use case in mind, knowing that there was going to be a really consistent number of updates on a yearly to 18-month basis, where customers want to use a consistent infrastructure approach deployed at rack scale,” he said.

Dell has upwards of 460 kilowatts of capability built into its IR7000 rack design, which Schmidt said makes the company confident it can offer its customers a “consistent architecture” moving forward with its roadmap.

“We think we're an excellent partner to help kind of ease the concerns about redeploying the latest AI capabilities … We have the architecture that helps that happen. We can give them a consistent behavior, and we can do that across all aspects, power, cooling, software, managed systems, management behavior.”

In addition to the R770AP and XE8712 launches, Dell also unveiled two new network switches, the Dell PowerSwitch Z9964F-ON and Z9964FL-ON.

Powered by Broadcom Tomahawk-6, the switches deliver 102.4Tbps of switching capacity with multi-rate flexibility. Dell said the switches will accelerate AI workloads and HPC data centers and can support air and direct liquid-cooled large-scale deployments with over 100,000 accelerator chips.

Dell is also making its PowerScale NAS (network attached storage) available as an independent software license on its servers, with the company also launching a new software-defined Dell ObjectScale. Dell said these new configurations will help organizations like cloud service providers boost AI performance while providing them with the flexibility to adopt the latest server and networking technologies to meet their infrastructure needs.

Additionally, Dell PowerScale parallel NFS (pNFS) has also been updated to support Flexible File Layout, allowing for improved parallel distribution of data across multiple nodes in a PowerScale cluster.

Looking to the next 12-18 months, Schmidt said that as performance continues to improve, he expects architecture will become increasingly optimized to support specific AI use cases.

“I'm really excited about what we're doing at an infrastructure level to help our customers, because it is not a straightforward life cycle motion to stand up these large deployments, and Dell has this expertise,” Schmidt said. “These tools and these products that we’ve released here this week are just that. It's another example of the type of scale we're delivering.”