The Economics of Agentic AI: Cost Advantages of Dell AI Factory with NVIDIA vs Public Cloud from Pilot to Scale

Mitch Lewis
09/08/2026

The Dell AI Factory with NVIDIA datacenter solutions can achieve up to 68% savings and deskside solutions can achieve up to 90% savings vs. public cloud.

Compared with frontier APIs, savings can reach up to 94% for datacenter solutions and 98% for deskside solutions.

As agentic AI reshapes enterprise deployment, economic impact has become the leading metric organizations use to justify AI investment, according to Futurum Research. Evaluating infrastructure choices for AI deployments requires understanding how price and performance interact to support a given workload. Today’s AI workloads are rapidly shifting from standard interactive chat applications to autonomous agentic workflows. This represents not only significant changes in the interaction and efficiency of AI, but also the economics of the supporting infrastructure.

This report evaluates the economics of running agentic AI workloads on premises with the Dell AI Factory with NVIDIA compared to open-weight and leading frontier cloud hosted models. The study utilizes performance results from nine distinct Dell platforms, modeling three separate agentic workloads over a 2 year time horizon.

Key findings include:

The Dell AI Factory with NVIDIA portfolio delivers cost-optimized solutions across every workload profile evaluated. The configurations evaluated pair Dell systems with NVIDIA GPUs and Nemotron™ 3 models; the modeled datacenter configurations also include NVIDIA AI Enterprise software.

Dell AI solutions achieved a cost advantage in all configurations evaluated against AWS Bedrock and leading frontier APIs, with savings ranging from 8% to 98%
Advantages hold from single-workstation pilots through multi-server production deployments, across low, medium, and high task complexity, and across model sizes from 30 billion to 120 billion parameters
The largest configuration evaluated supported over 30,000 concurrent agents, while the architecture enables further scaling with additional nodes

Compared to open-weight model pricing on AWS Bedrock, Dell AI Factory with NVIDIA datacenter solutions achieve up to 68% savings and Dell deskside solutions achieve up to 90% savings.
Compared to leading frontier API costs, Dell AI Factory with NVIDIA datacenter solutions achieve up to 94% savings and deskside solutions achieve up to 98% savings.

Note: This Lab Insight report was originally published in September 2026 and was updated in October 2026 to evaluate additional Dell AI Factory with NVIDIA configurations and refine the analysis.