You're buying fat new servers to save energy and make room for AI hardware, claims Dell Dell believes its customers are consolidating server fleets to save energy and free up rack space for AI hardware – and has a giant jump in revenue to to prove it. The hardware giant on Tuesday delivered [PDF] its Q3 2025 results. Its Infrastructure Solutions Group was the star, posting $11.1 billion revenue – a 34 percent …
Indeed, the AI hype bubble has been deflating recently, as is also true for green initiatives. It will be interesting to see the reactions of these big computing firms now there two favorite reasons for buying their kit are running out of steam.
As for AI hype, it can't go away fast enough. It would be nice if the field was able to get on with proper R&D instead of being inundated with rabid MBAs looking for their next fix.
I don't think it's even that...as old servers die and get replaced, the replacements that arrive are a lot more capable and you can naturally consolidate stuff rather than buy new servers as the old ones die off.
I don't think any decision maker is waking up thinking "fuck, gotta get the power bill down, better replace all the servers".
An el cheapo PowerEdge R250 with an 8 core CPU and 64GB of RAM with SSDs is a lot more capable than a dual socket 8 core with 64GB RAM and spinning rust from a decade ago.
The capability of hardware and what you get for the money has rocketed in the last decade, but businesses are mostly running the same shit they have been forever.
I recently replaced a shit ton of fried hardware after a UPS blew up, it was half a dozen Proliant G5 servers (relax, it was backed up and there were redundant solutions in place)...most of what they were doing I have consolidated down to just a cluster of three Dell PowerEdge R250 boxes and stuff that was chugging before is now flying along.
The services I managed to consolidate are things like Jira, Confluence, Jenkins, SVN etc...stuff that doesn't really need to be on a whacking great big powerful box, it doesn't even need to be on an in house server, it could just exist in the cloud...as a result I now get more compute out of 3U of space than I did out of 24U...the cost savings that come with it are a bonus...there was no conscious decision to scale back on the hardware for cost savings, we just totted up what we needed and it turned out we didn't really need baller class servers. If cost was a concern and I really wanted to save the biggest stack of cash and use the smallest amount of space and energy, I could have built the same solution on a bunch of Ryzen Mini PCs.
I do have clients that care about cutting edge performance and require it (rendering farms, AI companies etc), but these guys don't care about energy costs or consolidation of space nor do their customers. It's all just the cost of doing business to them.
With server performance we've reached a point where typical business related stuff for companies under 200 people (which is most companies) will run just fine on anything there is no need to spend huge amounts of money to run your business services and if you do, you're not really giving yourself any kind of meaningful advantage.
Yeah but you don't want large operating profit, that's taxable...the reason a lot of large companies fire people en masse is because they're getting ready for another round of buying fixed assets and deductable expenses...offloading liability and onloading assets...that's why stock prices go up when a company has a large layoff...because the investors know that money is probably about to be poured into fixed assets which increase the value of the company and the value of the company is more important than the profits.
Salaries are money going out that you never get back, buying fixed assets is money that goes nowhere that can be unlocked either at a profit if times are tough, or at a loss to create a tax write offs to offset rounds of new hiring in the future....buying or producing something for X and selling it for Y is greengrocer levels of business...doing X to offset Y to increase value is corporate levels of business.
This is why in the tech world we see really weird bundles on offer from time to time...like a motherboard that has a power supply bundled with it or a couple of sticks of RAM. Sometimes it's more cost effective to give old stuff away at the tail end of its life cycle and write it off against tax accrued on new profitable stuff that is coming in than it is to sit on the stock, pay for the storage of it and wait for it to sell...especially if the tail end of one line and the start of a new one is in the first or second quarter of a financial year.
Sir, have you really NOT heard of Dell EMC IDPA (Integrated Data Protection Appliance)?!?!
It is an industry leading solution in a convenient form factor with over 20 years of deprecated intellectual property delivered in a container-FIRST mythology!
Allowing your team to enhance Developer productivity & time-to-market improvements, and, Deeper customer insights and rapid response to emerging opportunities!
Can the corporate bullshit artists never find a peak? Is it (the BS) never-ending, from them?
From the title: "You're buying fat new servers to save energy and make room for AI hardware, claims Dell"
Riiiight...and as the old, paraphrased, bumper-sticker-saying goes, "Guns Don't Kill People, Just Like Spoons Don't Make Rosie O'Donnell Fat".
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