NVIDIA standardised the DSX POD. Crusoe and Dell now compete on operation and channel

NVIDIA's reference design turns the modular data centre into a standard part that 17 named partners can build. Crusoe brings operating capacity; Dell brings an enterprise sales channel.

Crusoe and Dell announced support for NVIDIA's DSX POD on 21 October. NVIDIA's release names 15 other partners, including HPE, Lenovo, Schneider Electric and Vertiv.

The box is now a standard part that many vendors can build. The contest shifts to operation and channel. Crusoe has the operating capacity today; Dell has the enterprise sales channel.

NVIDIA's DSX POD is a blueprint any partner can build. NVIDIA says partners assemble Vera Rubin AI factories inside modular containers and validate them before delivery. Its release says deployment at a prepared site can fall from six months to as little as 14 days.

Seventeen vendors will build to that blueprint, which leaves delivery and service as the main points of comparison. NVIDIA says they will deliver in early 2027. Crusoe, Dell, HPE, Lenovo, Schneider Electric and Vertiv are among them.

Crusoe will bring the DSX POD to market through Spark. Spark is its prefabricated data centre, built in Crusoe's factory and shipped ready to deploy. Crusoe says Spark will support the DSX POD. NVIDIA calls the DSX POD a blueprint for modular infrastructure for the Vera Rubin platform.

Crusoe says it has built and operated modular data centres since 2020. It bought electrical manufacturer Easter-Owens Electric in 2022 and formalised the business as Crusoe Spark in 2025.

NVIDIA endorses that record. Charlie Boyle, a vice president of DGX systems at NVIDIA, says Crusoe applies its modular AI factory expertise and brings production inference online faster.

Crusoe is also scaling production. Chief strategy officer Cully Cavness cites "hundreds of past modular deployments". Crusoe has announced a 352,000 square foot Spark factory in Brighton, Colorado, to mass produce the units.

Crusoe says Spark is already deployed for Crusoe Cloud customers in production. The named example is Ollama, a tool for running open source models that Crusoe says serves more than nine million developers.

Ollama runs dedicated workloads on Spark modules powered by solar energy and second life batteries. Crusoe says that lets Ollama bypass traditional data centre supply chain bottlenecks. Ollama chief business officer Michael Meltzer says Crusoe owns the full stack, from power to GPUs, across data centres in the US and Europe.

Crusoe makes the sharper speed promise. Its head of Spark, Bryan Schramm, says it can deliver productive AI capacity in as little as three months. Crusoe says Spark cuts field construction timelines from years to months.

Spark Liquid is Crusoe's next unit, built for Vera Rubin systems. It is the sixth generation, with up to 3.5MW of compute per unit and five times the density of earlier generations. It joins the Brighton line in 2027.

Spark Liquid's closed loop cooling uses no evaporated water, which Crusoe says suits water stressed regions. Crusoe lists cloud capacity, edge sites near users and sovereign AI as its uses. It says the efficiencies pass to customers as lower costs and faster deployment.

Crusoe sells a single system that it builds and operates end to end. Its release says it connects factory manufacturing with cloud operations, with a live Crusoe Cloud platform behind the modules. A delivered box is therefore tied to the capacity running inside it.

Dell comes from the enterprise market, with more than 6,500 enterprises on the Dell AI Factory with NVIDIA. Its release puts that up from 5,000 last quarter, or 30% more, based on its August analysis of customer order data. The count covers Dell's wider AI programme, not DSX POD buyers.

Dell's container is the Dell Modular Data Center with NVIDIA DSX POD, due in early 2027. It will include compute, storage, networking, rack level power and liquid cooling. Dell says buyers connect it to prepared power, reducing onsite integration work.

Dell sells its AI Factory on ownership. It frames the factory as infrastructure enterprises own and control. It cites a Signal65 and Futurum analysis that puts the factory up to 90% more cost effective than public clouds over two years. The footnote says the comparison depends on assumptions such as a two year deployment and estimated cloud discounts.

Dell offers lifecycle engineering, backed by more than 20 years of work covering integration, testing, delivery, deployment and lifecycle management. Crusoe cites six years of modular operations.

Dell's operating layer is Managed Services for AI, which govern access and track AI costs. Dell says they are due in the first quarter of calendar 2027.

Dell's larger servers follow in the same quarter. The PowerEdge M9882 packs 256 NVIDIA Vera CPUs into one 48U rack. The XE9810 is a rack scale inference system with 16 direct liquid cooled trays on Groq 3 chips.

Dell's nearer products are smaller. The PowerEdge R8822, an air cooled two socket server, is due this month. The Dell Pro Precision with GB10 is a desk machine in a 64GB configuration.

Dell Pro Precision arrives on 23 October and can be linked in clusters of two or four. A GB300 version on Windows, with up to 748GB of coherent memory, is listed as coming soon.

NVIDIA's own page aims the DSX POD at large, greenfield, liquid cooled builds. Named buyers include NVIDIA Cloud Partners and other organisations building capacity at scale. NVIDIA adds that conventional and other modular construction approaches remain relevant for other builds.

Crusoe fits that buyer directly because it is a cloud operator that makes its own modules. Dell serves a different market through enterprise systems and services. The distinction leaves Crusoe selling capacity it runs and Dell selling through an enterprise channel.

Dell says early 2027 for the container and the first quarter of calendar 2027 for the servers and Managed Services. NVIDIA gives early 2027 for all 17 partners. The first Dell container will show whether an enterprise channel can turn the blueprint into running capacity.

If Dell misses that date, Crusoe's operating lead remains the only one already proven with customers. Crusoe says only 2027 for Spark Liquid, and neither vendor has published a DSX POD delivery date beyond that. Dell's early 2027 is the first date anyone can check.