Dell Shares AI Advances And New Metrics To Evaluate Infrastructure

InnovationEnterprise TechDell Shares AI Advances And New Metrics To Evaluate InfrastructureByMaribel Lopez,Senior Contributor.Forbes contributors publish independent expert analyses and insights. I help firms understand AI, mobile and cloud to improve their businessFollow AuthorMay 18, 2026, 06:05pm EDT--:-- / --:--This voice experience is generated by AI. Learn more.This voice experience is generated by AI. Learn more.Michael Dell discussing the explosion in AI tokens at the 2026 Dell Technologies WorldDellAt Dell Technologies World in Las Vegas, Dell Technologies chairman and CEO Michael Dell made a pointed argument to a room full of enterprise technology leaders: the metrics organizations use to evaluate infrastructure are evolving.GPU counts, cloud versus on-premises comparisons, and model benchmarks have dominated the conversation. Michael Dell’s day one keynote introduced two additional measures aimed at tying infrastructure decisions to actual outcomes: time to token, which measures how quickly a system processes a request and returns a usable AI output, and cost per token, which measures how cheaply that output is produced at scale. “Time to first token is incredibly important with investments of this scale,” Dell said on stage, noting that the company now has 5,000 enterprise customers running production AI workloads on its Dell AI Factory with NVIDIA platform. The figure represents a significant increase from the program’s launch two years ago.NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang, appearing alongside Dell, described why those metrics have taken on new urgency at both its NVIDIA GTC conference and at Dell Technologies World. Agentic AI systems, which reason, plan, and execute tasks autonomously over extended periods, require anywhere from 100 to 1,000 times more computation than a system simply responding to a query. “What took months now takes weeks, what took weeks now takes days, and what takes days now takes hours,” Huang said, describing the productivit...