The technology and business worlds have always moved fast, but the current pace of change feels more intense to Todd Lieb, vice president of cloud partnerships for Dell Technologies.
“There’s an acceleration,” Lieb told The Forecast at the 2026 Nutanix .NEXT event in Chicago.
“Things seem to change almost on a daily basis, whether it’s new things happening on the political front, regulations, supply chain changes, all of the things that we’re wrestling with day-to-day. And then, AI is an accelerator for everything.”
Infrastructure is, of course, critical for helping organizations keep pace. But even though hardware is more readily available today than at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, Lieb noted that supply chain challenges continue to frustrate IT leaders. This is especially true as more large organizations get off the sidelines and begin ramping up their AI-related investments.
“The enterprise was taking its time, but it is now starting to really move,” Lieb said.
“I think there’s a belief that you’re either all-in and moving quickly to implement AI as a core part of your business, or else you’re falling behind. That mindset has customers moving quickly.”
It also has Dell building partnerships with other technology companies to ensure its new offerings work seamlessly with existing and emerging technologies commonly used in data centers.
Beyond Cost Considerations and Supply Challenges
Historically, IT has largely been considered a cost center, and technology leaders have faced substantial pressure to bring projects in under budget, Lieb explained. But with companies increasingly centering their operations, and, in some cases, their identities, around AI, the focus has shifted from cost control to simply procuring the IT resources they need to rapidly stand up new capabilities.
“You hear about pricing in the press, but the reality is that the conversation is moving from price to availability,” Lieb said.
“It’s about who actually has the components, and who has the ability to deliver to their customers over time. Customers are talking about cost less right now. Instead, they’re saying: ‘I need to make sure I have these components. I need this equipment to help me run my business.’”
While some organizations may be tempted to “sweat” their data center infrastructure as they wait out supply chain bottlenecks, Lieb noted that current backlogs make this approach impractical.
“You might be willing to sweat for six months, but when you have a window that might be a couple of years in terms of supply chain challenges, do you really sweat for two extra years?” he said. “At that point, you’re introducing different levels of risk.”
Lieb pointed to the rapid adoption of what Dell calls its AI Factory with NVIDIA as an illustration of this urgency. The term refers to pre-integrated, on-premises stacks of GPU-accelerated servers, storage, and networking that enterprises can deploy without spending months assembling and validating components themselves. He said that Dell has built thousands of these capital-intensive installations, signaling high demand for AI-ready infrastructure.
“Our customers are saying, ‘Let me invest today so that I can make sure that I have access to assets,’” Lieb said. “Then the question becomes: ‘What am I manufacturing? How am I going to take advantage of these capabilities?’”
Data Is Sexy As Storage Gets Pulled Apart
In addition to fueling demand for new data center equipment, Lieb said, AI is also changing the calculus that informs datacenter architecture due to a renewed focus on data and storage.
“There’s a phrase within the world of AI, which is: good data, good AI; bad data, bad AI,” Lieb said. “All of a sudden, data is sexy again.”
Lieb traced the evolution of data center architecture from three-tier infrastructure with bare metal equipment to hyperconverged infrastructure and the current moment.
“What’s required today is the ability to scale compute and storage separately,” he said. “You have to pull them apart again so that you can grow them, separate them, and apply what you need when you need it. Storage becomes the key repository for the data that’s needed for AI.”
The rapid pace of change, Lieb said, is spurring partners like Dell and Nutanix to work together even more closely than before.
“Customers are telling us that they want Dell and Nutanix together in the room with them to figure out architecture, delivery timelines, and pricing,” he said.
“For them to deploy Nutanix and follow their strategy, they need assets running underneath. We are seeing tighter partnerships as a result.”
The Sustainability Imperative
AI is also forcing companies to take sustainability seriously, Lieb said.
He said it’s expanded from being a pillar of corporate responsibility to an operational priority.
“I think sustainability has moved from being a green, feel-good perspective to an imperative as it relates to how you deliver compute and storage to the business,” he said. “It’s a hot topic everywhere, especially with how much heat GPUs give off and how much electricity they consume.”
Lieb noted that growing resistance to data center construction further incentivizes consolidation and efficiency. A single current-model server may provide as much compute power as several legacy servers, he said, potentially allowing businesses to shrink their datacenter footprint and environmental impact even as they increase resource utilization.
IT teams, Lieb added, are now closely tracking heat production and electricity consumption in their datacenters, and then running those numbers through AI models to seek new efficiencies.
“It’s actually getting very sophisticated,” Lieb said. “We’re entering an era of optimization.”
Calvin Hennick is a contributing writer. His work appears in BizTech, Engineering Inc., The Boston Globe Magazine and elsewhere. He is also the author of Once More to the Rodeo: A Memoir. Find him on LinkedIn.
Ken Kaplan is Editor in Chief for The Forecast by Nutanix. Find him on X @kenekaplan and LinkedIn.
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