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Two Legendary Founders: Travis Kalanick & Michael Dell Live from Austin, Texas
Travis Kalanick sees physical automation as a way to digitize industries; Michael Dell says AI gains require companies to redesign how they work.
All-In · Chamath Palihapitiya & Jason Calacanis & David Sacks & David Friedberg
- Travis Kalanick · CEO, Atoms
- Michael Dell · Chairman & CEO, Dell Technologies
The best minutes
- 3:10Physical businesses can be built like an atoms-based computer3 min
- 44:16AI returns require redesigning company processesPro pick 5 min
- 1:03:55Michael Dell committed $6.25 billion to children’s accounts5 min
Also worth watching
- 28:54Capital matters when it can change the competitive odds3 min
- 52:28Inference is moving closer to data as cloud costs rise5 min
- 7:30Automation can make remote mining sites viable3 min
- 10:53Waymo leads, but scaling remains a major challenge3 min
- 26:24Atoms is focused on specialized robots for industrial work3 min
Skip the California politics discussion, the China segment, and the rest of the Invest America and Social Security discussion.
Summary · 5 min read
Travis Kalanick says he spent seven years building in stealth at City Storage Systems, which he introduced as Atoms; its work includes food, mining and robot mobility. Michael Dell says he started Dell Computer in his UT dorm room with $1,000, about 42 years before the event, and that the company expected about $140 billion in revenue that year.
Travis Kalanick says Atoms applies computing principles to physical industries, starting with food and expanding into mining and specialized robots. He argues that automation can make difficult or inhospitable work more practical, while physical AI still faces challenges in hardware, energy use and autonomous systems. Michael Dell says AI can improve productivity, but companies need to redesign processes and organizations to realize the gains. He also sees AI infrastructure moving toward both data centers and devices, and discussed his and Susan Dell’s $6.25 billion commitment to children’s investment accounts.
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- 0:00Stealth kept the company hidden
Travis Kalanick says thousands of employees kept the company off their LinkedIn profiles, and its operations used different names in different countries. He says the secrecy put employees in an unusual position, and he introduced the company publicly after years of building in stealth.
- 2:58Atoms applies computing to the physical world
Kalanick compares physical industries to a computer: manufacturing manipulates atoms, real estate stores them, and transportation or logistics moves them. He says Atoms began with food infrastructure, aiming to make prepared meals and delivery efficient enough to approach grocery-store costs.
- 5:44Automation opens new industrial markets
Kalanick says Atoms is extending from food into physical mining and specialized robots, including a wheelbase for moving through the physical world. He says the company is close to completing its acquisition of Pronto, which automates mining equipment. Automation could make existing mines more productive and allow work in places where labor or safety concerns make human crews difficult.
- 10:53Autonomous driving has different hurdles
Kalanick says Waymo is ahead, but faces challenges in manufacturing, scale and urgency; he describes Tesla’s path as technically difficult and says the timeline remains uncertain. He wonders when physical AI will have a step-change in capability like ChatGPT did. He also says a Waymo takes 100 times more energy to drive than a human, and sees language-like communication as one way to make physical systems more efficient.
- 16:10Austin feels more like home
Kalanick says he moved to Austin in December after having a place there since 2021. Leaving Los Angeles was painful because it was home, he says, but the city felt increasingly strange and his team was asking when they would move. He says Austin feels like a place where people want to build the future.
- 20:11Kalanick says justice underpins civic health
Kalanick criticizes San Francisco’s street changes, citing bike and bus lanes he says sit unused and a Market Street project he describes as costly. He says California could use ballot initiatives to address problems, and argues that truth and justice act as society’s immune system. He connects weak crime enforcement and limits on police to broader civic decline.
- 25:39Specialized robots need better hardware
Kalanick says humanoid robots attract attention for their hands and movements, but Atoms focuses on specialized robots that can do useful work. He describes food-machine challenges such as putting a bowl in a paper bag without tearing it, and agrees there is room for investment in materials science and the hardware behind physical AI.
- 28:54Capital matters when it creates an advantage
Kalanick says raising capital is a strategic capability when a competitor’s funding can quickly take market share, as happened in Uber’s early market. He says his Middle East business had planned to go public in January, but the Saudi market fell 20% over about a two-month period, dampening the plan. He says he was not actively raising money during the Iran war.
- 32:06China raises the competitive bar
Kalanick says China’s manufacturing base and cities have advanced dramatically, and describes Shenzhen as having moved beyond his earlier comparisons with Kansas City. He says Chinese manufacturers are hungry and that the United States should step up its game. He also favors better relations and says immigration can bring valuable innovators to the United States.
- 35:59Texas pairs growth with room to build
Michael Dell says he started Dell Computer in his dorm room with $1,000 and that the company expected about $140 billion in revenue that year. He credits Texas’s pro-growth business climate, power, land and ability to build for attracting companies and data centers. He says the University of Texas has helped seed companies in Austin.
- 43:41AI gains require organizational redesign
Dell says his AI infrastructure business grew from $2 billion to $10 billion to $25 billion, and he expected it to reach $50 billion that year; he also says Dell had more than 4,000 AI Factories in enterprises. He says some use cases deliver productivity or efficiency improvements of 20% or greater, but companies must rethink processes and tools from the top down. He says leadership and willingness to change, not technology alone, often determine adoption.
- 52:07Inference moves closer to data
Dell says AI infrastructure will span data centers, the cloud and devices, with inference increasingly happening near where data is created. He argues that generating tokens on devices can cost less than using public cloud, and points to progress in open models that run on smaller machines. He says autonomous agents will need controls to authenticate and validate what they do.
- 59:45Dell sees AI as human amplification
Asked about job disruption and public concern, Dell says he is optimistic that AI can accelerate education, scientific discovery, health care and work on unsolved problems. He calls AI an amplification of human potential, while noting that it has been presented in ways that may make it seem human. He also argues that software is difficult to stop from spreading onto personal computers.
- 1:03:45Dell funds children’s investment accounts
Dell says he and Susan will give $250 each to 25 million children ages 2 to 10 in qualifying zip codes, a $6.25 billion commitment. Brad Gerstner says every child under 18 can claim an account, and that children born in the United States from January 1, 2027, will automatically receive one; he says the $1,000 government contribution must be reauthorized every four years. Gerstner projects that $5 trillion could move into the accounts over 15 years through contributions from companies, states and families.
Published Mar 17, 2026.
Transcript · 56 min read
All-In, hosted by Chamath Palihapitiya, Jason Calacanis, David Sacks and David Friedberg, with Travis Kalanick and Michael Dell.
Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.
I don't know if some of you knew I was an angel investor in some companies. On the count of three, what's my favorite angel investment of all time? One, two, three. Thank you. Give it up, Travis Kalanick. Appreciate you. All right. Wow. On a big news day, Travis is here on a very big news day you spent uh wow i guess like seven years just in the lab building last year every year i ask you hey you want to come to the online summit you want to say no it's like i'm gonna just chill i'm building next year hey you know just always available you don't understand i'm stealth yeah stealth i'm stealth nobody knows where i am nobody knows what i'm doing the employees are not allowed to put the name of the company on their linkedin thousands of employees that weren't allowed to put company name on LinkedIn. I mean, incredible. And I'm like, okay. And their parents thought they worked for the CIA. Yeah. And then he's like, and by the way, Jake, how you can invest, you can't announce it and you have to sign it. You can't mention you're an investor. It's like, okay, no problem. I'm just happy to be on the cap table. Is he like kind of like secret saying what he wasn't supposed to say? Well, you know, you're out now. Let's go. You're out. It's out.
You came out of stealth today. It's so funny. It's so great. You came out of stealth. Well, you talked a little bit. You came to All-In Summit last year. Is that fair? You say you're coming out of stealth today? Is that right? Well, look, let's just start with what that meant for our employees. Because again, imagine if you're at a multi-thousand person company and every single employee has stealth on their LinkedIn including salespeople okay including recruiters like it was they were they were living life on hard mode it's kind of fun too right I mean I mean yeah it was like kind of cool what the what's what is this why are there why is this massive density of stealth right startup people in Los Angeles what is happening over there yeah yeah also technically the name of the company in different countries was very generic names of companies i mean everything was designed to be stealth right so we operate in 30 countries in the u.s the kitchens product is known as cloud kitchens in korea it's kitchen valley in the middle east it's namah in latin america parts of latin america it's casinos aqueltas i mean you get the idea you can't even remember all the names and all the code words think about it yeah think it through
but we have four in china you know it's like all over the place yeah but things have gone really well and you've been a little acquisitive so tell us about the branding today that you're announcing and then maybe some of the acquisitions and evolution of the company you're not just renting kitchen space? Those who, I mean, know how I thought about things in the Uber day,
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“CPU manipulates bits. What manipulates atoms? manufacturers. manufacturing. Storage stores bits. What stores atoms? Real estate.”
stuff we're doing more computers now and so the name of the company is called atoms and it's let's say the mission uh is um is uh physical automation to transform industries and move the world and so we have our food computer talked about then we do we're doing mining mining as in mining not data mining we're talking about atoms guys yeah so well of course you do some mining data mine too but the point is is physical mining so automation of mines and uh the mission there is more productive minds to power earth's industries right so it's got this industrial real Atoms vibe to it. And then on the transport side, it's a wheelbase for robots. Because if you're doing specialized robots, not humanoids, specialized robots, you need to be able to move and act in the physical world. But the minute you're moving, you got to have a wheelbase.
So it's just part of the equation. And a lot of people go look at Tesla. It's great. Look at uh look at waymo awesome they're cruising around austin of course but there's so many things that move it's not just a ride sharing thing um and so um obviously including mining equipment that's doing its thing so you guys that's the general sort of idea and we acquired a company on the mining stuff a company called pronto or it's about to close it's we're we're inches from closing is the way to put it what were they doing what was their business pronto automating mining equipment were they based uh they're based in san francisco so you and i were starting to talk about this
“When you automate, you can go to a lot of places. Well, first is all the mines that exist are way more productive.”
You got to do the shout out to Tesla and all the things because I like to sort of break down the physical AI stack includes not just like, oh yeah, computation, and I've got to have physical AI models, and I've got all the things you sort of think of. What about land development? That should be in that stack. What about chemistry?
That needs to be in the stack. Manufacturing needs to be a stack. When you look at the stack, you're like, damn, Tesla's got this. They are the Google of this era, which is what I mean by that is in the 2000s if you were doing a startup in the 2000s the first question you would get is uh why isn't why isn't google gonna kill you or why isn't google just gonna do it right they're not gonna know that they killed you and before that microsoft and before that was microsoft late 90s uber had a time 2010 yeah what if uber puts that in the app come on it's like dude this is uber i'm like yeah but you know i think in the physical ai space that's a that's sort of a tesla thing but there's so many things to do you got to shoot your shot I got to do
“look i think waymo obviously is ahead the existence proof is there their issue is manufacturing and scale”
is it about to happen is it about to happen for physical ai and that's what this is about yeah and the fun part about it is machine learning deep learning this kind of thing for many years decades was like inscrutable i don't know what the thing is thinking it just spits out an answer and i know it's correct well now you can have a conversation with it right like imagine if it's driving your car and there's different agents and one's just driving the other's like yo look out over there yeah it's like oh just like how we roll it was like somebody does that you're like you're like honey that's like 200 meters away we're gonna be okay yeah jason and i don't call
each other honey but i got you yeah like sweetie you know yeah okay so anyways that was odd wasn't it okay okay i didn't mean it that way i didn't mean it yeah yeah you know i meant it okay language is a beautiful compression mechanism that humans use a hundred watts of energy like and you put that in a scheme of things of like ai training ai energy the power plants that are built to do the thing that isn't even at human strength yet. Okay. The Waymo machine takes a hundred times more energy to drive a Waymo than a human does to drive a Waymo. So, so language, there are still things that humans are great at and that unbeat, like the goat, we're still the go to certain things. Language is this epic compression. And we need to find ways to compress because like when you think about how we first started looking at the physical world is we saw everything. And you know what, guys, and this is sort of obvious, like it doesn't matter what the cloud is doing if I'm driving. But like the car doesn't know that. It's pulling in every freaking data point and processing everything. And it's, you know, look, they've been about sort of carving out the things that don't matter and things like this, but there's ultra awesome.
versions of this. And you can imagine how you can use language or things that look like language to communicate either amongst agents, or sort of safety systems with a driving system to sort of get very efficient answers and to identify safety issues very efficiently. People don't know that you've moved to Texas as well, most people don't know, but it's it's out there. Yeah, you moved here in December. So now you're a resident of Austin. Yeah, I was. Thank you. It's very exciting for me. We've been getting to play some backgammon. Backgammon cards. We're having a good time. So I've had a place on Lake Austin since 2021.
And I go there. I'm an avid water skier. You're impressive at water skiing, I have to say. So I've had a place in Austin for five years. Frickin love it. It's my weekend. I would go 15 weekends a year. what do you think is going to happen in california it's pretty messed up look i i grew up in cali like i grew up in los angeles uh my parents were born and bred in los angeles which basically makes them the founders of la okay but um so i have a lot of heart like my whole family everything you know it's pretty it's pretty it's yeah i don't want a lot of us feel that way i don't want to get the violin out but it just but it's heartbreaking to play it totally wait it's just a place you grew up is your home you know when you have to leave uh but it's getting weird out there and uh it feels like it's getting weirder and at some point that's it's just too weird it's too weird do you think everyone's gonna leave i mean it started with elon and it was like yeah he was we don't we don't want elon here and then he's like message received right and then it kind of worked its way down the tech industry and in the kind of you know world of people building businesses and whatnot and now it's kind of gotten so broad in terms of the group and joe rogan
comedy music new yorkers restaurateurs i mean this place is the fun i'm not even talking about this i'm just talking about everyone leaving la or sorry leaving california is almost like working down this path of look my the rest of my team's like we're when are we moving you know they're like and how are you dealing with that so that was the question was like gotta buy homes on the lake there are literally dozens of startup ceos of call it successful or growing companies that i talked to who were like dude i want to leave but i got employees here i got an office here i got a facility here i build stuff here how am i going to leave yeah i totally get it it's a real thing so look i think like most things uh sort of when it's time and it feels painful to do something sometimes it's actually not as bad as you think and you just got to make the move and lead and do it um and so uh that's kind of what that's kind of the process the almost like a morning process i went through and that's just what it is and you're setting up a team here yeah of course uh and i got that office right on the lake did you get that uh it's the one we are negotiating no it's all good no no it's all good we're negotiating right now okay but i'm gonna
jet ski to work no literally we were is it the true story last year we're like driving up the thing and i was like wow i wonder who owns that he's like i will and i was like did you look at He's like, I looked at that and I was like, that's a, that would be a nice one. But the truth is, you know, and I had a couple of people move here a couple of years ago and they all had the same reaction. Oh my God, I'm living in a place that's twice as big for half as much. The people here are dope. The food is dope. Everybody here is got this sense that we're building the future and it's just fun and world positive.
And, you know, for me, I got. To live New York, LA, San Francisco, I did three of the great cities in this country. This one feels the most like home to me, which is a very strange feeling to me, but it feels like everybody here wants to build the future. And it's very diverse, you know, like all these different industries and people pursuing stuff. I think this is the future. Yeah, here's the thing. Like you go to San Francisco, and I still have a little nostalgia when I go to San Francisco, just having built Uber there and the whole thing. um i still get the you know the butterflies just i do you know but it does have something magical you just can't take it away and then you look at all of these bike lanes and these bus lanes that never have a bus or a bike in them and cost 400 million dollars to build one mile and it's literally it's sort of like this subconscious desire to choke the city off now remember i look at things through roads. That's how I think. So I'm just like, obviously, the city is totally busted. Yeah. They literally took Market Street, and they're like, what would be the optimal way to this up and virtue signal at the same time? And they're like, yeah, buses. And it's like,
nobody's on the bus. Nobody takes the bus. It's a beautiful, small town. That whole street is that whole street is empty and it's painted red okay so okay so we all bitch and complain non-stop when are you like honestly this is like yeah i'm number one i get it but free bird when are you leaving okay well on the chat you're the best by the way i'm like okay so let me just by the way there's a couple glasses of wine in public facing friedberg yeah and he's like you know i think there's a better way to do this and then there's like darth friedberg in group chat he's like these people these morons are they're destroying society he is like darth kreenberg in group chat am i lying am i lying is he the most correct especially after a couple glasses of wine yeah when i start drinking i fall off a cliff and he takes pictures he's like fourth beverage i'm like oh it's worth staying up on the group chat yeah and then i'm like i'll go and attack this congressman on twitter which i realized yes delete the tweet yeah don't delete the tweet yeah i delete the tweets okay so there's a group of people trying to raise 500 million dollars to create like a tech slash business coalition to go to sacramento which arguably is something that everyone's left
and avoided doing forever because no one wants to spend time in freaking sacramento fighting politicians but it's almost like we're all falling off a cliff it's time to do something Do you think there's a realistic path back? Do you think that people can actually get their sh** together? That even if 500 million came in, there's a way to kind of turn around the state, fix some of the policies? You think it's too late? I don't think that... Look, I would go... Look, anybody who's doing anything to fix things, I'm like, hell yeah, let's do something. The issue is we all grew up in the tech world, which was like a libertarian place where you stay out of politics and that kind of...
It was that kind of vibe. It was just, everybody was like that. Leave me alone. I want to make stuff. Yeah, I just, I'm not, I don't do that. And that's obviously, this is not a thing anymore. In California, I think the ballot initiatives are very powerful and there's very clean ways to get something on the ballot. Love that. I think that your DAs who have decided we do not enforce crime at all anymore, that's like a sweet spot. Like I believe that I sort of had this aphorism. is truth and justice are the immune system for society. When the immune system is suppressed, all the social ills flare up.
So look for the places where truth and justice are being deteriorated, are being degraded, and say, how do we get at that? Because if you get at that, everything else downstream will be better. so that's kind of how I look at things and how I also determine whether the world's getting better or worse. When I say weird, I'm talking about truth and justice. That's what I mean when I say, oh man, it's getting weird. It's getting weirder, which means it's weird. I'm just talking about truth and justice. Well, I mean, and you look at the homeless industrial complex, you look at Chesa Boudin, which the all in pod, Saks, myself, and the pod, like we literally led the recall of him and then you have the same thing going on in la where they were just like if somebody gascon yeah gascon i mean we basically lost the script you're running the city for the criminals it literally is like a batman movie it's like bane i mean here you want to arrest the criminals look i was born in the darkness i mean these guys are lunatics yeah look i i know police officers in los angeles who are no longer police officers and these are lifelong guys who protect and serve that's in their bloods or dna they want to protect people they want the bad guys to be dealt with
and they they almost have ptsd from what it is like to want to serve and see bad things happening and not being allowed to stop it yeah nobody's got their back and they're not allowed to do their job. It's it's crazy and I it's getting weird. Okay. Hey, I want to just go back to a sorry for the darkness. I don't know. I think it's good. I was trying to induce. I'm trying to induce dark free bird. Well, I brought it up. Yes. I mean someone bring me a tequila. I'll get going. Yeah, let's do it. Can we get a couple? It was funny. I went on this podcast yesterday and the guy and I defer the guy was like the first hour was middle of the road. I was talking about tax and science and then like politics came up. He's like so socialism and he said like you lost it and then you were like he's like the energy with 10x and who is this yeah so it'll come out in a couple weeks but i was like it got me going okay i want to talk about physically i one more time yeah so one of now that now that you're doing this i saw a presentation the other day someone showed like a video of a squirrel jumping from one tree to another tree and they're like a tenth of a watt or something yeah like like the biology
is tuned and it's so perfect in terms of its efficiency of energy utilization to do physical things and we're taking these like big things of metal and motors and like actuators and if you add up or you compound all of the inefficiencies in the system it's like 1200 watts to get the robot to walk four foot like yeah like break apart not just the software but the hardware layer
“And we're sort of down specialized robot lane, which is gainfully employed robots.”
“capital as a strategic weapon for its own sake is not a thing but when it is actually a strategic weapon then it is a thing”
and it won't be the end of the world maybe even a better world then we get to a better place and i think progress, abundance, the golden age happens. And a lot of it is about all the things that are happening in AI, in physical AI, and just the productivity gains that are coming in very massive
ways. Yeah, I mean, it was shock and awe, and then, hey, now we've got a steady state, and let's hope that's what happens in Iran, is that we can depose these evil dictators and replace it with something a little more stable. And related to this, before we wrap, they're going to China, the big trade deal being negotiated. What do you hope comes out of this Chinese thing? And what did you learn in China? Yeah, what would you learn, and what do you think would be great for America? Like, what would you like to see and be like, man, that's going to set us all up. No more. Look, here's the thing. If you go to China right now and you go and just take a tour of the manufacturing that's going on there, just the manufacturing base, the cities, especially if you've gone to China for a couple of decades in a row, you're like, damn. Yeah. So let's just do two things. You go to Shenzhen, which before felt like Kansas City, but 50 years ago and really humid, which I guess is Kansas city sometimes, but you go there now and it's like one upping Singapore. Right. Or so that's the city view. You're just experiencing a very awesome. You're like, this is advanced and you just get the vibe and it's everywhere. And then you go and you start
seeing the manufacturing base and you see what like Xiaomi is doing or any of the other, there's so many scrappy guys badass guys everywhere and you're like f they're hungry so does anybody remember the 2008 olympics in beijing anybody does anybody this is a little bit you're down rabbit hole does anybody remember the opening ceremony and you're like these mofos are taking over at least that's what they want to do that's just happening so i don't have any issue or this is not negativity for me i'm like these guys are killing it the best idea is winning they're fiercely they're fiercely going after truth and progress and they're making happen let's step up our game okay but we can also have a friendly game like we don't have to like be like the detroit pistons in the 90s you know yes we can we there's a way into the stands yeah yeah you know there's a way to do this right and there's a way to do it like adults i hope that's where we would end up. I have an employee who... Because for a long time, we're the largest kitchen builders in China. I have an employee in China, has an American wife. They both live in China. They're both from China originally. But it would be great for him to work here on some things I'm doing.
it's very hard to make that happen right now now that's selfish like i like maybe selfish like i'm like there's a person i've been working with for over a decade i'd love to continue here maybe there's other bigger picture items that i'm not dealing with i'm not the geopolitical guy but i'd love for them to be sort of good relations and good like like if you have a significant other who is an American citizen. Like, do we have to make that hard as an example? Some normalcy would... Something, you know, I'm just saying. Now, I agree, like, there are ways to do immigration properly. Like, we effed it up super bad.
Don't even get me started. But there's also, there's good migration too. Like, a lot of great innovators all over the place came from other places for their own version of the American dream. God bless. Freiburg. and we don't have to that doesn't have to be a negative thing and so I'd like to see more of that and yeah China's China's wild so let's let's keep our eye on the ball and let's let's give them a run for their money too give it up for TK alright well done brother thanks bro That's great. Good to see you, brother. Wow. Michael Dell. My lord. Texas native. Yes, born in Houston. Well, I missed the opening.
We jumped to the music, but you started Dell Computer here in Austin with a thousand bucks. 42 years ago in my dorm room at Adobe, at UT, about 10 days before I finished my freshman semester. Amazing. And it's been working out pretty good. Yeah, it's been some bumps in the road, but yeah, it's generally worked out okay. Yeah, we'll have about $140 billion in revenue this year, so. Yeah. It's okay. It compounds over time. doesn't it yeah yeah you know you start small and just keep adding and there you go that's how it goes yeah it's just that easy but why texas like i think this is an important thing we're in austin jason lives here david sachs lives here now more people are moving from california to austin why austin why texas why is it work here and is it getting better is it just always worked You know, I think Texas has had a, you know, low tax pro growth environment for a long time and pro, you know, sort of progressive business climate.
And, you know, if you sort of look at the growth of the Texas economy relative to the rest of the United States without Texas, you know, Texas just kind of looks like a better version of the U.S. economy. And, you know, now you've got, Austin is sort of just about in the top 10 cities in the United States. So you've got, when that happens, you'll have four of the 10 largest cities in America in Texas. One out of 10 children born in the United States, born in Texas. More New York Stock Exchange companies in Texas than in New York or anywhere else. and uh you know you've got the university of texas here in austin which i would always think of as kind of the wellspring for a lot of the companies that are here certainly ours and um you know a long history of of uh innovative pioneering spirit and entrepreneurship and um it's been a fantastic place for us and part of this i think freeberg and michael is what's happened in the other great cities or what were once great cities my hometown new york got to spend 10 years in la and the last 12 in the bay area and what's happening there is incredibly un-american uh and they're decelerating when compared i think maybe the gap maybe and the disparity from these two locations has gotten greater yeah and you're seeing a lot
more people say life there here in Austin seems a lot better than the life I'm living in New York LA or in the Bay Area yeah well I've got a lot of new friends and neighbors you know that have that have come and certainly I mean if you look at the the migration statistics Texas has has attracted an enormous number of people. And look, I mean, when you look at the environment here and compare it to the other kind of situations that are going on, it's very attractive. But, you know, it's kind of been great for a long time. So it's not really news to us that have been here a while. Yeah, Elon had a great experience when he was building the...
the gigafactory over here they let you do stuff here basically you know they let him build it which he said was like an incredible experience for him because in california they didn't let him build you know these factories and in fact the tesla factories that in fremont was just an old ancient factory that he was able to retrofit so there's something going on here as well with the data centers and that's actually i think very close to what you're working on at dell maybe you could talk a little bit about the data center boom that's going on in texas that maybe people aren't paying attention to sure well there's you know obviously been enormous build out of ai infrastructure and that requires you know lots of new data centers lots of power texas you know has an enormous uh advantage there relative to other states a lot of power a lot of land and it's and and you can build stuff right so there's there's been a massive build out particularly in some of the cities in and towns in west texas where there's not a lot of population and so they're not really too opposed to having data centers out in the middle of nowhere where there's land and power and so um yeah i mean the the the demand for tokens is enormous you know we've been building these ai data centers not just here in
Texas, but around the world. And the growth in that has been tremendous. We introduced the first H100 server. It was literally a couple of weeks before ChatGPT was announced. And the progression of our business in that area has sort of gone from like 2 billion to 10 billion to $25 billion to this year, it'll be like $50 billion. So, tremendous growth. And when you think about what these models are creating, there's this phase change that's happened in computing, right? We had 60 years of calculating and computing. Now we have machines that are thinking and helping us think. And so, the demand for that kind of intelligence and the models are amazing, but they're also the worst they'll ever be. And they continue to improve. And so we just see a lot more demand than supply. And it's happening not just in the hyperscalers and the cloud service providers. It's happening in 4,000 enterprises where we're building these Dell AI factories. It's happening in sovereign AI, like Palantir. And people want to protect their data but also use ai on it they want to bring the ai to where their data is and you know when this kind of started a few years ago we had some really sophisticated uh large companies think
think of like fortune 100 and they started you know buying these ai servers from us and and they kind of knew what they were doing right you know and we said well what what are you doing And they were kind of taking and building their own models. They were taking open source models. They were running them. Some of them were algorithmic traders or, you know, derivatives of machine learning. And, of course, they needed a lot of help in doing that because it was sort of a complicated thing. So about two years ago, we put together this product that we called the Dell AI Factory. And now we've got 4,000 plus of these, and it's kind of running rampant across enterprises.
How do you think about the payback time on the investment that's being made? The administration put in place this accelerated depreciation rule. Yeah, that's very helpful, actually. Just for folks to understand that a little bit, if you spend $100 billion this year building data centers and buying infrastructure for those data centers, you get to write off 100% of that this year to deduct it so you don't pay taxes. You pay much fewer taxes. And that's in place for 10 years, I think. That's a 10-year deal. So it's accelerating the investment.
“So when you have any company, its processes and tools and technology are a function of what was available at the time it created those things.”
But let's use the internet as an analogy, which you saw up close. There were businesses that were internet transition successful. they made the transition maybe macy's.com versus sears roebuck right right maybe macy's did a better job of taking advantage of the internet than sears but then there was internet native businesses that seemed to blow them all out and maybe amazon's a good example or csn stores whatever they be wayfair etc what's the right way to think about this evolution in industries generally, are we going to have their businesses that are going to transition successfully and those that aren't and they're going to die? And is this really going to, are we going to see AI native businesses in every industry come in and just disrupt everything? I believe we will. And certainly, you know, when you talk to the Collison brothers at Stripe, they'll tell you that the rate of growth of the 2025 cohort companies is about four times faster than the 2018 companies.
And so every year, the new batch of companies are growing faster and faster because they're starting with all these new tools that, you know. Because they see all the new companies on their platform. Exactly. And so when you think about an incumbent company, okay, that already exists, it has, let's say it's got brands, it's got balance sheets, it's got, you know, customer relationships, whatever stuff, right? Okay. But that's sort of like, those are expiring value assets. If it doesn't change quickly and get onto the other side of this, I think it will go out of business, which is exactly the speech I gave to our team, you know, three years ago. And I think, you know, you have to be bold and you got to go make those changes to to not only survive this but but to put the thrive and you know i think about it is how do we prepare our company to be ready for the 2030s right isn't it like it's much more it's kind of the storyline there's more to do than there ever was it's like when the internet around kind of came around sears doesn't just need to sell locally they can sell of the world well sure i mean this is the point and the ai lets everyone do everything when we have better tools we can do way more things right and and uh you know when you know when i hear
people say oh you know um maybe we're just gonna have all these great tools and we we won't do more things we'll just do the same things with fewer people it doesn't sound right to me i mean there'll be some of that but i think most of it will be we're just going to do a whole lot more things. solve a lot more problems we're going to accelerate scientific discovery excited about we're we're going to invent all sorts of new things we're going to solve all sorts of problems that haven't been solved and you know that's that's super exciting what do we have wrong on infrastructure so the original build cycle looked a lot like everything's in a data center everything's got to sit there that's where all the intelligence it'll all be in these kind of hosted proprietary cloud models? Do you think that it's open source? Is it distributed on the edge? Where does the intelligence, where does the inference sit? And how does that really
“everybody loves the public cloud, right? Until they get the bill, right? When they get the bill, they're like, wait, this is supposed to save us money.”
you know have the right controls and and that sort of thing yeah and uh your take on agi and when we're going to hit it like you actually think about super intelligence and agi and the
the two sets of problems that could solve there and do you have a personal definition that you like to use for those when you're talking internally with your team of how things are moving? I don't really know, Jason. You know, I think it feels like with the latest releases, we were talking about this backstage, you know, the Gemini 3.1, the Opus 4.6, the OpenAI 5.4, it feels like we sort of hit some kind of threshold where just the quality of the models are just tremendous. And when I listen to what our teams are able to accomplish in a day or two weeks that would have taken them, you know, a few months or nine months time, you know, it's just amazing the speed of innovation.
And so it seems to be continuing and we get all the reinforcement learning and there's also tons of private dark data that these models haven't been applied to. And that's sort of what's happening with these. I think the auto research is the, that's the key with auto research, the capacity to take a standard model and then retrain it on your private data and keep it private and build an advantage for your organization based on the history of your data that no one else has. That seems to be what a lot of folks are thinking about that have the capacity. But if you were to start a company today that was not in computing, and you were to build a business from the ground up, how would you architect your people and your organizational principles as an AI kind of first knowing what you know about computing and where things are headed?
Are you hiring people? Are you hiring a bunch of people to run a bunch of agents? How do you think about architecting a new business today? It's a great question. I don't really spend a lot of time thinking about that. You know, I'm thinking about how do I... the rest of us are thinking how do i run our company i mean that's hard enough so yeah everyone i talk to that's the question they're like everyone goes to these off sites and they're like i'm actually doing this with my management team on monday we're doing like a teardown be like hey how would we build the business differently today no what we know what we've been thinking a lot about is it's sort of this this reimagining question yeah you know sort of all right we know the trajectory of the tools what are the tools going to be in 27 28 29 and how do we accelerate you know our path to that how worried are you about social issues so AI recently ranked as the most unfavorable term of a list of terms, including President Trump.
It was somewhere between ISIS, the Democrats. ICE, ISIS, and the Democrats. ICE was better than AI. People liked ICE, mass agents. More than they like AI. Yeah. Well, I think part of the problem is it's been, you know, maybe sold as, you know, it sort of presents itself like a human would. yeah right and you know maybe if we called it linear algebra matrix multiplication statistics instead right matrix multiply maybe that would be more friendly i don't know you know yeah but do you think we're gonna have no i think you're right the positioning is wrong and then we're not communicating to people hey this could help health care this could make you live longer this could help your kids get educated more that this could help with housing costs this could help with food cost. Messaging aside, I mean, how much do you actually worry about disruption or dislocation in employment, about acceleration of earnings for some people and deceleration for other people in society that feel left behind? And that starts to fuel more of the kind of social concerns and politicians saying, hey, we got to stop building all the data centers, you know, like that kind of stuff and how much are you really i tend to be you know more optimistic and and um you know i i
do i do think that in all technology cycles you get sort of these network effects and uh that's kind of inevitable but i also think you know uh we're going to do more with the tools you do have this acceleration of all sorts of great things i mean education can dramatically improve scientific discovery health care energy you know all sort of the the unsolved problems can be accelerated ultimately i think it's it's amplification of human potential and capability and extending the frontier too and and and and by the way we should also remember that basically what we're talking about here beyond sort of some of the advanced semiconductors and the, you know, big data centers, we're talking about software, right?
Yeah. Right? It's like software that runs on your computer. So, you know, somebody says, well, we don't want that. It's like, how do you stop total software? I mean, how are you going to stop someone putting an open source model on their computer at home and asking it for medical advice? You know, New York just passed a law saying AI models can no longer give medical advice. I don't know that it's passed, right? It's being proposed. Oh, proposed, yes. It's being proposed. You can't give legal and health advice. We're anti-software. We're also anti-books and advice. So if you were going to look it up in a book.
But were you dropping into your Bernie Sanders right there? That was my Bernie Sanders. Michael Dowell. The 1% of the 1% that you're enabling with your data centers. Why are you doing this to the people of our great nation while you give your money to children in their Invest America accounts? Yeah. This is a good one you're doing. Yeah. Can we talk about Invest America? I think he might have even criticized that, but, you know. Well, that's the problem. The billionaires are giving our children money, and they're not asking us permission, and then those kids are going to buy things that their parents never asked for.
Well, they don't actually get the money until they're 18 years old, so that's... But what gives you the right to give our children an education? What is this philanthropy? It makes no sense. No, I mean, honestly. Well, I see my great friend Brad Gerstner here. Brad's here? There he is. Brad, come up for this little segment here. Sit for a second. Let's talk about A Messed America. We've got five minutes left here. So, you know, I heard about... Everybody's the fifth bestie. Give him a round. I know he's going to be here. Yeah. All right. How did this go down, Michael?
“I heard about this idea in 2021 from Brad. And I thought, you know, that's just a great idea. That's an awesome idea.”
just one, one punch up. The name, Invest America, Trump accounts. What do you think? Were you considering this in the context of other philanthropy?
I mean, how do you kind of put this together in the spectrum of how you think about giving back? Yeah, great question. So, you know, we have a foundation that's very focused on children in urban poverty. That's basically the central focus of the foundation, although folks in Central Texas would know that we do a few other things here in our local community. and you know when i've heard about this idea one of my thoughts was wow this is like a platform for directly giving to the people that we're targeting right and you know we actually thought about doing it just in texas first and um you know things have gone pretty well with the company and that so you know we thought we just go bigger and and what happens brad if you know 10 more michael dells show up and and there are dozens there's not a lot of michael dells let's be honest but there there's a number of folks who could make an equal size or even greater gift um there are people who you know many hands makes for light work there are a thousand people who can make a gift of significance what if this actually becomes a movement and we and i and i think i think it actually is becoming a movement instead of a moment and and and we've you know we've got
a lot of that queued up brad once you wait have you called anybody michael you have you did you michael and i chair the invest america giving committee and we're ambitious guys so you're knocking on doors we've we've had a few conversations you're texting people yeah yeah so so so just there's a question earlier first it's really important to understand and for you guys to spread the word every child under the age of 18 every child under the age of 18 is eligible to claim their account number one number two you've heard this like oh kids born between 25 and 28 no this is forevermore the legislation creates this account forevermore every child child born in america starting january 1st 2027 will automatically get an event will get a trump account right at birth stapled to their social security card the thousand dollars has to be reauthorized every four years okay but the accounts don't so every kid this is social security 2.0 this is the biggest change to the social contract in america in hit in 50 years 3.7 million kids a year, we'll get an account that can compound. It's a 401k from birth. And yes, we're going to have a lot of announcements, but it's not just billionaires. It's going to be companies that
are donating stock on their IPOs into these accounts. It's going to be wealthy people. It's going to be states. It's going to be moms and dads. It's going to be corporations. And the estimate is over 15 years, we can move $5 trillion into the pockets of families that would have otherwise had zero, $5 trillion. And so to me, the leadership that Michael showed, not only in helping me get the meeting that ultimately got this passed into law, and it does take people. Those moments either happen or they don't happen. And if they don't happen, there's no law, and this doesn't change kids' lives. By the way, two things on this. If this $5 trillion dollars moved through government programs, it would get incinerated.
That's what we see happen. There's just a million crony structures that take it away and destroy it. So to give it directly into the accounts is the circumstance. The second thing is it makes a lot of sense that you guys can, I'll be the lead, but can we replace social security in this country with a defined benefit or defined contribution like this? And eventually everyone has a Trump account or whatever you call it. and we don't have to have this fake Ponzi scheme that we call social security. If Australia can do it, we can do it. Well, they have a defined benefit program, but I'm saying like everyone has an account and they all own a piece of their future and every time you get a payroll to tax deduction, instead of it getting eviscerated and destroyed and vaporized, that money actually goes into an account and you buy a piece of a company and maybe you can direct it.
Freerberg's getting angry. On July 4th of this year. You're getting me wound up. So for all the, there are four and a half million kids who've claimed their account. Almost $150,000 a day we'll have on the trajectory. We're on $10 million by July 4th, our 250th anniversary of the country. Every one of those kids' accounts, the parents and the kids, on July 4th, they'll see an app on their phone that looks a lot like a Robinhood app. It'll see them owning. It'll say, you've received your $1,000 or your $250, and it will show a little bit of NVIDIA, a little bit of Walmart, a little bit of Dell.
We decompose the S&P 500, which they own, into the constituent parts so they can get excited about being an owner in the upside of America. And when moms and dads double-click and Apple pay $5, $10 into the account, when they send their QR codes to their friends on their birthday, and now their friends all add to the account or on Christmas or bar mitzvahs, and they add to the accounts, when companies add to the accounts, all of this, they see it growing. and it unlocks the human potential. It's not just the money. It's that I'm in the game. I have a shot, which to David's point, I think the biggest crime of social security, and we made very clear, social security is a sacred promise.
We refused and many people tried to get us to take on the broader struggle. And we didn't do it because we knew it would kill this program. But let's be clear about this. our government requires all of us to give 10% of what we earn into Social Security, right? It was the social contract evolution in the Industrial Revolution that kept the country together. The only problem is it goes into a black hole. Nobody sees it. Nobody knows what's there, but it is your savings. Now, imagine if that same money was required to, you know, government took it away, but it was in an account with your name on it. You could see it grow. You You could get excited and say, hey, I'm going to add a little bit more to that, right?
And you had a little bit of choice. That, to me, is the possibility, and I think we will end up there. And, Brad, thank you for— Yeah, let's get it out for Brad. Here it comes. Finally! Yeah, I'm just going to say, you know, Brad also adopted his home state of Indiana. We have Ray and Barbara Dalio adopted their home state of Connecticut, and many, many more to come. And look, it's going to be super easy for anybody to add 100 kids in your neighborhood, adopt a zip code, adopt a school district, adopt a town. It's going to be amazing. Give it up for one of the great entrepreneurs of our time and an incredible pledge.
I'm doing all in
