Dell’s new AI Smart Solutions Centre comes one year after reports that it would be reducing its reliance on China. — SCMP
US personal computer (PC) giant Dell Technologies has set up an artificial intelligence (AI) centre in China’s southern tech hub of Shenzhen in a fresh sign of its commitment to the market.
Dell opened its AI Smart Solutions Centre on Monday, pledging to help enterprises with their AI transformation with upgrades to infrastructure – which includes its PowerEdge servers, PowerSwitch network switches and PowerScale storage solutions – and applications for AI PCs, the company said in a statement.
Dell plans to leverage its decades of experience in China across multiple industries – including healthcare, internet, education and finance – to help enterprises deploy AI capabilities, it said.
“As the AI wave approaches ... clients need a scalable infrastructure to meet the growing need for computing power and the challenge of data management, while achieving green and energy-efficient results,” Wu Dongmei, senior global vice-president at Dell and president of the Greater China Region, said in the statement.
Dell has based the new centre in Shenzhen as it looks to expand support for implementing AI in the Greater Bay Area, which includes nine cities in southern Guangdong province, Macau and Hong Kong, and Greater China, a regional designation that includes Taiwan.
The American PC maker is strengthening its presence in China after Nikkei Asia reported last year that it plans to stop using China-made chips by the end of 2024. Founder CEO Michael Dell told the Financial Times in April 2023 that the company was “intently focused” on buying components from outside China and its clients were asking Dell to diversify its supply chain, while declining to comment on the Nikkei report.
Wu, the Dell China executive, denied last November that the company was pulling out of China, according to a report by Chinese news outlet Jiemian. Last year, the company celebrated its 25th anniversary in the country.
Dell is tapping into growing global demand for AI hardware, with revenues from AI optimised servers growing 23% to US$3.2bil in the three months to Aug 2. Sales at the company’s client solutions group, which contains its consumer and enterprise PC business, fell 4% in the quarter.
Dell was the world’s third largest PC maker in the third quarter, according to Canalys data, but its market share in China has been shrinking. In 2023, Dell’s desktop and notebook shipments fell 44% year on year to 3.1 million units in China, ranking fourth behind Lenovo, HP and Huawei Technologies. In the first two quarters this year, it did not even make the top five PC brands in China, according to Canalys. – South China Morning Post
