Power & Sites · United States

Dell Expands AI Data Platform to Ground Agents in Enterprise Context

Credited to HPCwire · hpcwire.com · 1d ago

Dell AI Data Platform, the data foundation of the Dell AI Factory, expands with new data orchestration and storage capabilities

ROUND ROCK, Texas, Oct. 6, 2026 — Dell Technologies is expanding the Dell AI Data Platform so AI systems deliver better answers, cost less to run and reach production faster, giving applications and agents trusted, current context from a company’s own data.

In most cases the model isn’t the bottleneck to achieving enterprise scale for AI. The data is. A company’s most useful information sits in files, databases, cloud services and systems across multiple sites. Most of it was created long before anyone expected an AI agent to read it. It was never labeled, connected or organized with a machine reader in mind. As a result, agents burn tokens reconstructing answers that should already exist. Every query means more steps, more compute, more cost and slower, less trustworthy results.

The Dell AI Data Platform is built end to end, from where data is stored to where agents use it. Storage moves critical data to accelerated compute without bottlenecks; orchestration connects and prepares it; analytics and search transform and index it. NVIDIA Nemotron Retriever models enable document parsing, embedding and reranking. NVIDIA cuVS accelerates vector indexing and search. Because every layer runs on one platform, everything it produces traces back to governed data the customer already owns. Agents return to the same documents, history and decisions repeatedly, and most systems rebuild their understanding from scratch every time. That means answering the same two questions on every request: what does this term mean and how does it relate to everything else? Dell is extending the Dell AI Data Platform with three new features to answer both at once.

The Unified Semantic Layer, Knowledge Graph and Knowledge Agents hold a customer’s most valuable and sensitive information, so they stay inside the platform in the customer’s data center. The platform builds context from that data, keeps it current as the business changes and shares it across every application and agent, without locking customers into any single model, data or storage provider.

Acceleration and Security Built into the Data Path

Business context is only reliable if data is accurate, current and governed from source to application. Customers should not have to adopt another proprietary layer to accelerate different parts of their data environment. Dell brings acceleration into the data engines themselves, working with NVIDIA across the data path. Data must be transformed and analyzed, then reach accelerated compute fast enough to keep GPUs saturated and stay protected along the way. Dell data and storage advancements include:

Dell is expanding Dell AI Data Platform implementation services across its data and storage engines to move organizations from deployment to production results quickly and reliably. Dell Services establish a production-ready foundation, activating the platform’s analytics, processing, search and orchestration capabilities while keeping the platform tuned to the demands of AI workloads.

“Data without context is just noise. Most enterprises have spent years making their data accessible,” said Arthur Lewis, president of Dell’s Infrastructure Solutions Group. “That’s not the same as making it usable. An agent that can find a customer record but doesn’t know what it means, how it connects to everything else, or whether it can be trusted isn’t intelligent. It’s just fast. The companies that solve it won’t just deploy AI faster or run more agents. They’ll get more out of the data they already have.”

Dell Technologies (NYSE: DELL) helps organizations and individuals build their digital future and transform how they work, live and play. The company provides customers with the industry’s broadest and most innovative technology and services portfolio for the AI era.

CapitalAsia-Pacific

AirTrunk plans additional $1bn investment in data center campus in Inzai, Japan

Credited to Data Center Dynamics · datacenterdynamics.com3h ago

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Company plans to triple overall investment in country to $30bn

AirTrunk is planning to invest a further $1 billion in its data center campus in Inzai, Japan.

As reported by Nikkei Asia, the investment will be used to expand capacity and deploy liquid cooling technology at the campus, thus enabling the running of high-density AI workloads.

To fund this, AirTrunk has secured a $1bn green loan, led by Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corp, MUFG Bank, and United Overseas Bank, among others.

AirTrunk's CEO, Robin Khuda, said that the campus - dubbed TOK1 - is likely to be the first in Japan able to host large-scale AI deployments. He added: "Due to geopolitical reasons, we are seeing more ⁠and more customers looking to Japan from a North Asian perspective."

The new investment will bring AirTrunk's total investment across its Japan sites to $9 billion. During the next five years, it is targeting between $27bn and $30bn. The company also intends to increase its capacity in Japan from the current 530MW, to more than 1GW.

Founded in 2018, AirTrunk was acquired by Blackstone and the Canadian Pension Plan (CPP) for US$16.1bn in 2024, in what was the largest-ever deal in the space at the time. AirTrunk has data center campuses in operation and under development in Sydney (x3) and Melbourne ( x2 ) in Australia, as well as Singapore; Hong Kong; Johor, Malaysia; Tokyo (x2), and Osaka ( x2 ), Japan.

Earlier this year, the company announced it had acquired Indian operator Lumina CloudInfra, officially marking its entrance into India. It secured $2.3bn in funding for its campus in Johor Bahru, Malaysia, in July.

Original · Data Center Dynamics

Front Method

Power & Sites · Asia-Pacific

Firmus, CDC end planned $51B Australian AI buildout

Credited to Light Reading · lightreading.com · 5h ago

Photograph · Light Reading

CDC exits $51 billion AI data center project in Australia after its partner, Firmus, embarks on aggressive Asian expansion.

Nvidia-backed Australian data center alliance Project Southgate has broken up after just 12 months with a fraction of its planned 1.6GW buildout completed. CDC Data Centers has ended its partnership with Firmus – claimed to be worth as much as 73 billion Australian dollars (US$50.7 billion) – due to fears over Firmus' aggressive Asian expansion plans.

CDC CEO Greg Boorer told financial news site Rampart: "We're certainly not planning on doing 1.6GW of rollout with them because they made other choices regarding doing their own data center developments, which is slightly different to what we envisaged."

The partnership built just 42MW of data center capacity, all of it in a CDC facility in Melbourne.

Project Southgate was unveiled in October 2025 by Firmus, CDC and Nvidia as a planned rollout of Firmus' "AI factories" built on CDC data center infrastructure. It was intended to scale to 1.6GW by 2028, with Firmus claiming total investment could reach AU$73 billion ($50.7 billion).

Firmus Co-Chief Executive and Cofounder Oliver Curtis said the two partners had "mutually agreed earlier this year" to end their partnership, W.Media reported Tuesday.

He said the decision did not affect Firmus' current development plans. But it seems a string of major deals Firmus embarked on in the last four months, none of which has involved CDC, has administered the death blow to the CDC alliance.

These include a 360MW Nvidia-backed data center on Batam Island, Indonesia, as well as two sites in Malaysia for OpenAI, and another two sites in South Australia. Additionally, Firmus is partnering with Subco to build a new subsea cable from the Australian mainland to Tasmania.

The collapse of the giant project comes as Firmus, in a rare step, looks set to cut the price of its pending IPO because of risks over its mostly unbuilt data center capacity. Jun Bei Liu, portfolio manager at Ten Cap, criticized the company for an "unprecedented" lack of disclosure, ABC News reported.

Firmus had originally set the price at AU$A11 ($7.65), valuing the company at around AU$44 billion ($30.6 billion). But the IPO price is reportedly set to drop to AU$9 ($6.26) because of weak demand from investors.

Meanwhile, CDC’s valuation has declined, primarily due to higher interest costs following a series of rate rises in Australia this year. CDC is 49.7% owned by listed New Zealand and Australian infrastructure investor Infratil, which also owns New Zealand mobile operator OneNZ. Infratil says the latest independent valuation of its CDC stake declined by A$45 million ($31.3 million) in the third quarter from AU$9.21 billion ($6.4 billion) to A$9.17 billion ($6.37 billion).

Infratil's ASX stock declined 0.72% Wednesday.

About the Author

Robert Clark is an independent technology editor and researcher based in Hong Kong.

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