# Dell

> The American maker of PCs for offices and servers for data centers.

- Level: Basic
- Topics: Tech companies, Hardware
- URL: https://tidbit.legios.com.ar/dell/
- In Spanish: [Dell](https://tidbit.legios.com.ar/es/dell/)

**Dell** is an American computer company founded in 1984 by Michael Dell, who started it from his dorm room at the University of Texas at Austin, assembling PCs and selling them directly to customers. Skipping the shops and building each machine to order kept prices low and made it one of the largest PC makers of the 1990s. It is based in Round Rock, Texas, and its parent company is called **Dell Technologies**.

Today it has two big halves. One sells laptops and desktops, mostly to companies, under lines like Latitude, XPS and the Alienware gaming brand, plus monitors and accessories. The other sells the infrastructure behind corporate IT: **PowerEdge** servers, storage systems and networking gear. That second half grew with the purchase of EMC, a storage giant, in 2016, one of the largest tech acquisitions ever at the time.

In the AI boom, Dell has become one of the main builders of servers packed with NVIDIA GPUs, which it sells to companies and cloud providers that want their own AI infrastructure. It has also gone from public to private and back: Michael Dell took it private in 2013 and it returned to the stock market in 2018.

## An analogy

A furniture maker that sells desks and chairs to every office, and also builds the warehouses' heavy shelving: the same factory skills, two very different customers.

## Keep in mind

- Founded in 1984 by Michael Dell; known for selling direct, built to order.
- Sells PCs and laptops, mainly to businesses.
- Also sells servers and storage; bought EMC in 2016.
- A major builder of GPU servers for AI.

## Go deeper

- [Dell (official site)](https://www.dell.com/)
- [Dell on Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dell)

## Related terms

- [Laptop](https://tidbit.legios.com.ar/laptop/): A whole computer folded into one portable case that runs on a battery.
- [Server](https://tidbit.legios.com.ar/server/): A computer whose job is to answer requests from other computers, all day, every day.
- [Artificial intelligence](https://tidbit.legios.com.ar/artificial-intelligence/): Getting computers to do things that, until recently, only people could do.
- [NVIDIA](https://tidbit.legios.com.ar/nvidia/): The company that sells the shovels of the AI gold rush.
- [GPU](https://tidbit.legios.com.ar/gpu/): The chip that does thousands of simple calculations at once.
- [Cloud computing](https://tidbit.legios.com.ar/cloud-computing/): Renting computers over the internet instead of buying your own.