The last time I was in the States I was 21 years of age and known as Coach Jonathan.
A quarter of a century on, I’ve exchanged soccer camps for a technology convention – but the hot wind that hit me when I stepped out of the airport in Las Vegas yesterday took me right back.
All checked in at The Venetian and ready to check out the world-famous Strip, I was stopped in my tracks by the mother of all dust storms and had to retire back into the hotel!
Luckily hotels here are not like anywhere else so there was no danger of becoming bored: the resort contains bars and restaurants, a pool complex, shopping mall, a huge casino and even gondolas moving through waterways. The sight from my hotel room of a golden Trump Tower rising against the backdrop of the desert and mountains was another reminder of the excess of the place.
The sense of scale continued this Monday morning when I entered the immense convention centre – again, within the confines of The Venetian – where Dell Technologies World is taking place.
Joining Michael Dell, founder and CEO of Dell Technologies, on stage for the ‘Unleash the Future’ keynote were leaders at several world-leading companies that are working directly with Dell to harness the power of AI.
Eli Lilly chief digital and information officer Diogo Rau discussed the importance of technology to getting medicines out to the masses, as well as pinpoint targeting of cancer cells. “We’re on the verge of ending disease as we know it,” is how he put it.
Michael Dell said that for too long, AI has been trapped in a screen and unveiled a host of solutions his company is launching as compute demand increases – from improving performance and sustainability in data centres to hybrid PCs able to deploy and scale agentic AI workflows locally rather than in the cloud, saving time and money.
Caitlin Gordon (below), VP of product management for private cloud and AI solutions at Dell Technologies, told me afterwards that as well as being the cause of the demand, AI provides the means to solve it.
This is Gordon’s 21st Dell Technologies World conference, and the changes she has witnessed in the last few months are beyond anything she has seen before.
But it was the arrival of Jensen Huang on stage which really got the packed main stage audience buzzing. Huang is the founder and CEO of chipmaker NVIDIA, which started out making graphics chips for PC games but is now the world’s most valuable company. It is the partner for Dell’s AI Factory solution now used by more than 5,000 customers worldwide.
In his trademark leather jacket, Huang said the top software engineers of today are working with an AI agent to generate code before validation and deployment at a speed which would have been unthinkable a few years ago – but the engineers of the future will orchestrate entire teams of AI agents to unlock insights across every workload.
Huang joined Michael Dell in signing the innovative PowerRack server rack (pictured on right) – which contains an integrated liquid cooling system – to bring down the curtain on the keynote and kick off the convention in earnest.
