Why Dell Leads IDC’s Q1 2026 AI Infrastructure Tracker

As organizations move AI from experimentation to production, infrastructure decisions become less about isolated benchmarks and more about operational readiness. Teams need platforms that can integrate into existing environments, support demanding workloads and scale easily.

IDC’s Q1 2026 AI Infrastructure Tracker offers a useful external signal for organizations taking that next step. In the latest tracker, Dell Technologies’ AI-centric server revenue grew 422% year over year in Q1 2026, significantly outpacing broader market growth.^¹ On the storage side, Dell outpaced the competition and held the #1 share position in AI-centric storage.^¹That level of separation reflects sustained execution and growing enterprise AI customer adoption.

Why it matters for organizations scaling AI

Market share numbers tell part of the story, but customers want a technology partner that understands the real, complex environments and can support their needs as AI demands grow across the full stack. Proven execution, production-grade adoption and the confidence that comes from a track record. For many teams, the hardest part of AI is building an environment that can support ongoing training, fine-tuning and inferencing without creating new operational challenges. In practice, that means infrastructure must:

• • • • Support demanding AI compute requirements across different workloads and deployment models.

     

    • • Move and manage data efficiently, because AI performance depends as much on storage and data flow as it does on compute.

     

    • • Fit into the reality of enterprise IT, where integration, scale and reliability matter as much as raw speed.

     

     

For customers, this can translate into lower risk when moving AI workloads from pilot environments into production-scale operations. IDC’s Q1 results suggest Dell is gaining traction in areas that matter most when AI becomes a real business workload rather than a contained experiment.

The infrastructure behind the momentum

Dell’s announcements this year at NVIDIA GTC 2026 and Dell Technologies World 2026 reinforce why market momentum is translating into real-world adoption. The PowerEdge XE9812, built on NVIDIA Vera Rubin NVL72, delivers 10x lower cost per token than NVIDIA Blackwell-based systems,^² while the new fully liquid-cooled PowerEdge XE9880L, XE9885L and XE9882L servers on NVIDIA HGX Rubin NVL8 support up to 144 GPUs per rack across Intel, AMD and Arm-based CPU options. Dell offers organizations more flexibility to support demanding AI workloads at higher performance per kilowatt.^²

On the Dell AI Data Platform side, PowerScale and ObjectScale serve as the core enterprise storage engines — PowerScale for high-performance, scale-out file storage and ObjectScale for S3-compatible object storage. Together, they ensure data is always ready at the speed AI demands, keeping GPUs fed and productive so organizations can move from data to insight faster.

Choosing an AI infrastructure partner for production

The AI infrastructure market is growing quickly, and organizations have no shortage of options. IDC reported that Dell’s growth in AI-centric servers far outpaced the broader market, which grew at roughly 33.0% in the quarter. That gap matters because it points to real-world adoption, not just category momentum. For organizations evaluating their next AI infrastructure decision, the message is straightforward: prioritize a partner that can support AI across compute and data, integrate into your existing environment and help reduce the friction of scaling into production.

Enterprises and governments around the world are leveraging Dell AI infrastructure to power innovation across industries:

• • • • Firebird AI opened the regions largest AI Factory powered by Dell PowerRack with Dell PowerEdge servers and NVIDIA GPUs, bringing a fully operational, enterprise-grade sovereign AI environment closer to the researchers, developers and businesses doing the work across Armenia and the region’s.

     

    • • VOLT is launching the Dutch AI Cloud combining the Dell AI Data Platform, Dell PowerEdge servers and Dell PowerSwitch networking to power large-scale AI workloads across sectors from financial services to biotech to defense.

     

    • • Mazda is building a platform to accelerate AI-driven automotive development, deploying Dell AI Data Platform file storage (PowerScale) to unify its model-based development and CAD storage into a scalable infrastructure designed to evolve into a data lake for AI and generative AI workloads.

     

    • • Mistral AI selected direct-liquid cooled Dell PowerRacks with PowerEdge XE9712 servers with NVIDIA GB200 NVL72 to scale its AI capabilities and tools, powering open-weight models and agentic AI applications that customers can run on their own infrastructure, with full control over their data, models and IP.

     

If you’re looking for a partner to help turn AI plans into production outcomes, explore Dell AI infrastructure solutions or connect with a Dell representative to discuss your organization’s next step.