 Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage here in Barcelona for Mobile World Conference, now called MWC 2024, I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. theCUBE's coverage, great to have back CUBE alumni, Michael Dell, who's the CEO of Dell Technologies. Quite a run past decade. We're now on the AI wave. Welcome to theCUBE. You know, it feels like we're just getting started, guys. I mean, this is all very exciting and it has been a fun decade, but when I look at what's going on in the world and especially here at Mobile World Congress, well, it's like a whole new world of opportunity opening up with the cloudification of the telco networks. What's going on with AI at the edge, the explosion of data, which we've been talking about for some time. Lots of fun. You know, Michael, I wanted to ask you when you came on, because I've been watching your social love when you threw the throwback, your dorm room photos, you know, back in reminisce, the glory days found in the company, but also, Dave and I have been debating on our CUBE pod about how you transition to the web, okay? And these big waves, their transitional moments, AI is one of them, you saw it early. I mean, we were there four years ago when you led your keynote. It was all AI and data. Again, good call there, but now we're seeing, this is a wave. This is a embryonic and growing fast change in user behavior, user expectations. Every vertical is disrupted. We're in another transition, and you're in the middle of it again. What is your vision of this transition and how you're getting through it and how are you advising your peers and other companies, your customers? Well, first an interesting observation, you know, it's about every 10 years it feels like another wave comes. And they're built always on the previous foundations that have been set. So you wouldn't be able to have this wave unless you had all the advanced semiconductors, the data, the incredibly fast networks, the super fast storage to feed the GPU, the data, you know, fast enough, all the advances in computer science. But, you know, this feels, first of all, it feels like it's going 10 times faster than previous waves. And of course we're moving from calculating and computing into cognition and brains, which is a totally different space than we've been in the past. And that is, you know, kind of wonderful, exciting, bit scary as well, but I think it is ultimately an enormous moment for the expansion of the economy, human potential, creativity, and ultimately, you know, technology's always been about how do we make humans more successful, safer and, you know, healthier in everything that we're doing. And I think technology is going to do that even more so now that we have these AI superpowers. We were doing a look back this past week and everybody's talking about, is this the AI wave? Is it like the dot com bubble? And we did a look back just because we lived it through it. You obviously did thrive through it. The CAPEX investments for the internet were just enormous. And now you're seeing similar CAPEX investments here. And of course the cloud guys are pouring in money as well. So that CAPEX is just to your point, it's just going to allow people to develop on top of that, make their lives better. How do you see these two eras? There are a lot of similarities, a lot of differences. The big difference I see is this is going 10 times faster. So, you know, think about how long it took us to get 5 billion people on the internet, to get 5 billion people on AI is happening almost instantly. And, you know, we're seeing it quickly move from the cloud service providers and hyperscalers to the dot AI companies into enterprise. Hundreds of enterprises deploying these systems. And again, I talked about in my keynote, you want to bring AI to your data, not data to your AI. And most of the data is still on-prem and most of the data in the future is going to be created in the real world at the edge. And so the operators, you know, play a very big role here in, you know, bringing that capability, you know, into the real world. You know, supercomputing this past event we went to, it has the same pattern here. You're seeing a couple trends, the telcos and networking. But on the supercomputer, AI and HPC went well together. Data and clustered systems, we're calling it. You got more horsepower needed on-premise whether it's a GPU cluster or a compute cluster. But now workloads need hardware and software working together in a new systems way. In a way, it's almost like a new kind of server-like model. But it's not a server, it's a new thing. Yeah. What's your vision of this? Well, of course, you need data because if you have no data, you have no AI, right? You have bad data, you have bad AI. And, you know, the fuel for these systems is enormous amounts of data. That's a topic we know a lot about and spend a lot of time on, right? Dell Technologies with our great combination with EMC and that's worked out really well. Still number one in data storage, bigger than number two, number three, number four and growing and that's great. So you got your data and you got compute. It's a new kind of compute as you've seen with GPUs. You got memory, a new kind of memory, high bandwidth memory. Then you get into networking, right? You know, you got a new kind of networking and storage is particularly important here because if your storage or your memory or your networking are too slow, you won't be able to feed the GPU fast enough and your GPU will sit idle for a lot of the time. And given the cost of these GPUs, again, this kind of complete system architecture and being able to, you know, make that incredibly efficient is very important. And our demand, our backlog, our shipments of these systems with the GPU being at the center of it are growing at a rate like nothing we've ever seen. Michael, I've heard you're a sharp investor and like to make big bets. And so here you go by the Dell booth, big, big presence here, but it's going to take a long time to get the payback in this industry. What did you see? Why are you making the investments? You're doing some things with Vodafone and Dish, Dish actually reinventing itself. What did you see? How do you see that playing out? When do you get the return? And in my keynote, you know, we had Chris Sambar from AT&T come on stage with me and the big deal they announced with Ericsson, well, Dell's providing the servers as part of that deal. So, you know, OpenRAN is happening at AT&T with Ericsson and Dell. And so, you know, that's a real business. And I would say most, the vast majority of the network virtualization, cloudification of the network and O-RAN type deployments that are happening in the world were in the middle of them, whether they're programs or pilots. And so, about four years ago, well, you go back a little bit earlier, you know, a bunch of the carriers came to us and said, hey, we want to do virtualization. We want to buy your servers. We said, great, here's the servers. Go knock yourself out, right? And they said, but we need special things. He said, well, you didn't tell us that, right? So, we went off and we then created special infrastructure and software for automation. Then we started creating these building blocks, specifically for Telco. Open ecosystems are great, but carriers don't want open ecosystems. They want something they can rely on. So, we work with companies like Red Hat and Wind River, Amdox to basically build a certified solution that we know works and we can deploy consistently. So, they have a platform and then they can just put the applications on it, repeat it, and it helps them make this transformation to a cloud network, Telco network much faster. The question I have for you on the networking is kind of the last area we're seeing in cloud native where the work's being done to go faster. You mentioned that in this new systems architecture that's emerging, I'm calling it clustered systems with like a better word, but these are new micro clouds, a micro, and they're sitting on premise and the edge. So, you got the edge developing nicely with AI kind of forcing that out, as you said. Bring your AI to the data. Where do you see that opportunity at the edge? Because I think that's, to me, the key. The network has to be faster, okay? What's your vision on how you guys are solving that network problem as these new systems get built? It might be network controllers of the new switches or, hey, maybe we can reconfigure things certain ways for more compute in this case, more GPUs in that case. These are new system architectures. The network has to play the key role, otherwise it's a bottleneck. What's the problem to solve there and what's your vision on that? So, you know, keep in mind another way to describe the edge is it's the real world, right? It's like the physical world. It's like where stuff actually happens, right? And so, you're talking about manufacturing plants and retail stores and hospitals and logistics centers and anywhere where real stuff happens, right? And we've been seeing this move of compute into those environments. And now, you know, you want to connect it, right? And so, Private 5G is playing a role and we've also got some great partnerships there with folks like Nokia. We've got great Private 5G solutions, again, using our server and storage infrastructure. And you're right, the network has to become a cloud so the operators can stand up services so that application developers can write to that. That's what AT&T is doing. That's where all these carriers are going and we're going to help them get there. How long is the line to get your AI servers? A lot of people want to do this stuff on prem or have a hybrid, it must be out the door right now. So what's the situation like for you guys? The H100 lead times are down and literally we're like a 10 week lead time on H100s. So we're delivering those rapidly and in enormous volume and we're taking orders for H200. Those will start ramping around the middle of the year and look, I mean, it's a whole ecosystem of capability here that we're bringing together. I talked a little bit about the storage. We just released new versions of PowerScale, the F210 and F710. And these systems are two times or greater faster than our competitors in right performance in feeding the GPU the data. Is it really important, right? Because if you've got a $50,000 GPU and it's idle 20% of the time, you just lost a lot of money. So you need the networking to be really fast, the storage, the memory. And we're thinking generations ahead about how you really build these systems to be incredibly performant. Whether they're in mega scale data centers or on prem or at the edge. I really appreciate your time. I know you got a hard stop. I do want to get one last question. Dave will probably get one in too. What's your vision as you look at Dell Tech World coming up with your customer events happening? We'll be there. This year, what's going to be the theme? Can you share a little bit of the vision of what you're going to go into Dell Tech World? What's it going to be about? Obviously AI will be a big theme. What's the key vision that you're going to be hitting the marks on? More AI, AI, AI, what's your thinking? AI, AI will certainly be a big theme. And you're right, there are new computing architectures here. But it's not all about training. Actually most of the AI will be about inference and will be in the real world. And so kind of architecting the systems for the future and it won't just be in the data center, right? It'll be the AI PC, right? So AI is a great opportunity to reimagine everything that goes on in the world. And we're making it pervasive across everything we do. Our customers are embracing it and we're helping them. Thank you so much for your time coming by theCUBE. As always, awesome. Great to be with you guys, great to see you. Okay, thank you. Michael Dell doing a cameo by theCUBE has usual great content. The systems are changing, opportunities are everywhere. The world is going to get more productive and faster, smarter and hopefully more efficient. This is theCUBE live coverage from Barcelona. Thanks for watching.