Jensen Huang Says Half a Million IT Firms Need Reinvention for AI

At Dell Tech World 2025 in Las Vegas on Monday, Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA, issued a bold proclamation that nearly half a million enterprise IT firms worldwide are built on outdated infrastructure and must be rearchitected for the age of AI.

In conversation with Michael Dell, founder and CEO of Dell Technologies, Huang framed the rise of AI as the next industrial shift. “This is the single biggest platform shift,” he said. “It stands to reason—400,000 to 500,000 enterprise companies around the world have built their IT data centres over the last 30 years in the old way, and it needs to be brought into the world of AI.”

The discussion came as Dell and NVIDIA unveiled version 2.0 of their “AI Factory” partnership, a full-stack AI computing platform designed to help enterprises run advanced models on-prem, not just in the cloud. According to both CEOs, the goal is to enable businesses to use their proprietary data to generate intelligence and deploy it through AI agents.

Huang pointed to sectors like cybersecurity, software engineering, sales, and supply chain as immediate beneficiaries. “These AI agents can augment our human workforce with a digital one,” he said.

Not to forget, NVIDIA is betting big on AI agents for enterprises. At Computex 2025, NVIDIA unveiled a suite of technologies designed to accelerate AI and integrate it into the workplace. The new Enterprise AI Factory validated design and an expanded collection of AI Blueprints aim to assist companies in deploying AI-powered digital coworkers capable of reasoning, speaking, and adapting.

Dell remarked, “Many enterprises want to bring AI to the data—not move data to the cloud.” That shift, he added, is driving demand for modular AI infrastructure, from small devices like the DJX Spark to large-scale datacentre racks.

The tone was less about hype and more about urgency. Both leaders implied that enterprises must adapt or fall behind. With new Dell-NVIDIA products launching this fall—including systems optimised for x86, cloud technologies like Kubernetes, and even personal clouds—they’re clearly aiming to become the upgrade path for those with legacy infrastructure.