Inside the Dell Factory that Builds AI Factories

Building High-end Systems and the Air Cooled Area

Prior to being used to build the high-end liquid-cooled AI systems, this facility was used to build high-end mission-critical storage arrays, converged infrastructure, and more. As a result, there is another floor currently being used for air-cooled systems.

You can get some sense of scale from the photos, but this area is very large. Dell has upgraded the air handling in the facility to be able to handle so many systems running.

From what I gathered, the vision here is that many of the air-cooled AI systems, perhaps those going into enterprise data centers instead of the new liquid-cooled facilities, can be manufactured here.

We have shown this before, but if you have never seen these in a data center, hospital, manufacturing facility, or elsewhere, the power cables are tapped from bus bars overhead. That allows them to be moved to handle different sizes of racks but also they can be swapped to provide different types of power.

While we were focused on the Dell IR7000 NVIDIA GB200 NVL72 racks, the facility has a ton of capabilities beyond just producing those racks.

Sending Systems Off

As shown earlier, the packaging materials are saved as components are brought from the loading dock and then into the factory.

Those packaging materials, like the large sections that flank the sides of each rack, are stored and re-used when the pallets go out.

We managed to capture an action shot of two racks being packaged and readied for shipping.

These racks are so big, that is a two-person job. You can also see the orange shock absorbers in the shock pallets that the racks travel through the factory on in this image.

Franklin, Massachusetts Fun Fact

Landing in Boston, and driving to Franklin, Sam and I were curious about whether Franklin, Massachusetts was named after Benjamin Franklin. For those in our international audience, Benjamin Franklin was one of the United States’ founding fathers, signing all four of the major documents that founded the nation. He was also an inventor, publisher, and even an ambassador. Here is the Wikipedia link if you want to learn more.

The story of how Franklin got its name was that the newly formed town wanted to honor Benjamin Franklin. There was a catch. They requested a church bell as a gift for bestowing this honor. Instead, Benjamin Franklin thought that books would be a better gift.

Those books were then loaned out as a loaning library, making the Franklin, MA library the oldest public library in the United States.

We thought this was cool, so Sam and I grabbed a small camera and went out to the Franklin library to film a short bit to show STH readers.