As a global provider of digital infrastructure and technology solutions, Dell Technologies actively supports research and innovation ecosystems that advance Europe’s goals for secure, autonomous, and intelligent edge computing.

While Dell is not a direct partner in the ACES project, we share a strong alignment of vision and technology with several of its participants — including HIRO Microdatacenters, Lakeside Labs, and IPTO S.A. — who also collaborate with us in the Horizon Europe GLACIATION project (Grant No. 101070141).

Through this common network, Dell contributes to a shared European effort to develop trustworthy, efficient, and autonomous digital infrastructures that connect the cloud to the edge.

Shared Vision: Autonomy and Intelligence at the Edge

The ACES initiative’s ambition to create a cognitive edge-to-cloud framework for autonomous systems resonates strongly with Dell’s ongoing R&D focus on AI-driven orchestration, autonomous workload management, and distributed data intelligence.

Within GLACIATION, Dell leads the technical and scientific coordination of a large-scale distributed platform integrating AI-enabled workload orchestration, data governance, and power-aware scheduling across edge, core, and cloud layers. These objectives mirror ACES’s work on autonomy and distributed reasoning.

This shared direction creates natural synergy: projects like ACES explore knowledge-based autonomy at the edge, while GLACIATION focuses on data, power, and orchestration intelligence. Together, they form complementary components of a broader European landscape focused on managing and optimising distributed digital systems.

Dell’s Broader Role in the Ecosystem

Although Dell is not formally embedded within ACES, we maintain regular contact and technical exchanges with several of its partners through other collaborations and European innovation networks such as the Big Data Value Association (BDVA) and the AI Data and Robotics Partnership.

Our contribution as a stakeholder lies in sharing experiences from GLACIATION and related initiatives that directly support the exploitation and uptake of edge-AI research across industry.

Key aspects of our contribution include:

• Ecosystem bridging: connecting research outputs from projects like ACES with industrial testbeds and enterprise environments operated by Dell or its partners.
• Open innovation alignment: promoting interoperability through open standards, Kubernetes-based orchestration, and trusted execution environments (TEEs) that securely host AI agents at the edge.
• Knowledge exchange: facilitating cross-project discussions (e.g., with HIRO, Lakeside Labs, and IPTO) to identify reuse of architectural components, data-management tools, or policy-driven orchestration mechanisms.
• Sustainability and exploitation: providing insights on business and exploitation models for edge-AI adoption, based on Dell’s experience bringing research prototypes to production-grade platforms such as NativeEdge and Fort Zero.

Contributing to Exploitation and IPR Discussions

For Dell, exploitation goes beyond commercial uptake — it encompasses sustainability, standardisation, and ecosystem continuity.

Our internal research-to-product pipeline helps transform project outcomes into reusable modules, open-source components, and validated industrial demonstrators.

While ACES defines its own exploitation and IPR strategies (Deliverables 6.6 and 6.7), Dell’s approach in parallel projects offers a complementary model:

• Technology validation: using real hardware platforms (Dell PowerEdge R760, XR12, and 5200 Edge Gateways) to validate scalability, power efficiency, and workload intelligence.
• Open collaboration: contributing to shared architectures and APIs that support portability between research projects and industrial deployments.
• Policy and compliance alignment: ensuring adherence to evolving EU regulations such as the Cyber Resilience Act, Data Act, and AI Act, and sharing lessons learned from Dell’s regulatory engagement.

Such exchanges enrich the ACES ecosystem even without formal partnership, by feeding operational insights from active deployments into the broader exploitation framework.

Shared European Impact

Both ACES and GLACIATION contribute to Europe’s ambition to build trustworthy, autonomous digital infrastructures.

Together, their collective outputs advance three strategic goals:

1. Technological Sovereignty — enabling Europe to strengthen control over its AI and edge-computing stack.
2. Industrial Competitiveness — creating frameworks that help enterprises adopt intelligent, efficient, and privacy-preserving edge solutions.
3. Sustainability — ensuring that digital infrastructures reduce energy consumption, carbon emissions, and operational overhead.

As a global digital-infrastructure provider, Dell is committed to continuing its collaboration with European partners to foster innovation that bridges research and deployment.

Our engagement with common partners such as HIRO, Lakeside Labs, and IPTO helps ensure that insights and innovations are shared across projects, building a consistent, interoperable, and impactful European ecosystem.

Looking Ahead

We view ACES as an important initiative that complements the work of other EU projects that Dell participates in such as GLACIATION, SMARTEDGE, and INTEND.

Together, they demonstrate the strength of Europe’s collaborative research in enabling autonomous, intelligent, and secure digital systems.

Dell Technologies will continue to exchange experiences, facilitate knowledge transfer between projects, and help translate research results into operational, secure, and scalable infrastructure solutions.

Our goal is to ensure that innovations in autonomy, orchestration, and edge intelligence find their way into real deployments that serve citizens, industry, and public administrations alike.

Dr. Aidan O’Mahony

Dell Technologies — Technical & Scientific Coordinator, GLACIATION Project

Aidan O’Mahony – Dell Technologies — Technical & Scientific Coordinator, GLACIATION Project