Michael Dell

Michael Dell (born 1965) founded Dell in his University of Texas dorm room in 1984 and built it into the archetypal PC company — then took it private, merged it with EMC, and brought it back as an infrastructure giant. Four decades in, he has re-founded it once more, this time around artificial intelligence.

From PC boxes to AI factories

At Dell Technologies World 2024 in Las Vegas, Dell launched the “Dell AI Factory” with Jensen Huang’s Nvidia and told the crowd the company’s first forty years were merely the warm-up for the age of AI, which he ranks alongside the industrial revolution, electricity, and the internet. The bet paid off fast: Dell became a principal server supplier for Elon Musk’s xAI, and its AI server business scaled from roughly $2 billion to a projected $50 billion a year, with tens of billions more in backlog.

Dell has predicted that “artificial intelligence will out-do humans in every cognitive task,” while insisting the technology must augment rather than replace people — a line some labor advocates find hard to square with the layoffs accompanying enterprise AI adoption. He is not blind to excess: in October 2025 he told CNBC that “at some point there’ll be too many” AI datacenters, just not yet. His consistent message is that the buildout is early, real, and historically large.