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.