Dell Senior Director for Competitive Intelligence Jon Hyde published three new AI Factory blogs targeting competitors. In the first blog, "Where AI Factories Hit Their First Ceiling," Hyde claimed Dell's PowerScale used "72 percent less power, 80 percent less rack space, and 8x fewer backend switches than competitor reference designs," asserting that Nvidia-based AI Factories can hit power and space constraints. He stated that "Storage-embedded AI stacks tend to require more backend network switches," citing VAST Data's AI OS as an example. Dell said its PowerScale offering used "72 percent less power, 80 percent less rack space and 8x fewer backend switches" to deliver equivalent Nvidia benchmark performance than Everpure and VAST Data, with "41 percent less power and roughly 2x less rack space for comparable performance" against VAST specifically. Hyde claimed VAST's cited "77 percent lower power and 73 percent less rack space" figures are improvements over VAST's own pre-DPU baseline. In the second blog, "It's Called a Database. It Doesn't Act Like One," Hyde referenced a June 2025 theCUBE Research analysis describing the VAST DataBase as a "distributed index" lacking mature SQL optimizer and other enterprise features, reaffirmed in February 2026. Hyde also cited NAND Research noting VAST's database engine is "VAST-written."