OpenAI & Dell partner on Codex for on-premises firms

OpenAI and Dell Technologies have partnered to bring Codex into hybrid and on-premises enterprise environments, targeting businesses that keep critical data and systems within Dell infrastructure.

The collaboration centres on connecting Codex with the Dell AI Data Platform, which companies use to store, organise and govern enterprise data on-premises. The companies will also explore ways for Codex to work with Dell AI Factory, Dell's platform for AI workloads inside business environments.

Codex has become one of OpenAI's fastest-growing enterprise products, with more than 4 million developers using it each week. Businesses use the tool for software development tasks including code review, test coverage, incident response and reasoning across large code repositories.

Its use is also expanding beyond software development. Teams are beginning to use Codex-based agents to gather context across tools, prepare reports, route product feedback, qualify leads, write follow-ups and coordinate work across business systems.

Enterprise focus

The tie-up reflects a broader push by AI suppliers to meet demand from large companies that want new tools to work with existing data controls and internal systems. Many enterprises, especially in regulated sectors, still want workloads and sensitive information to remain in hybrid or on-premises environments rather than move fully to public cloud services.

By linking Codex to Dell systems already deployed across customer estates, the partners aim to place the software closer to internal codebases, documentation, business systems, operational knowledge and team workflows. That internal context is increasingly seen as essential to making AI agents useful in day-to-day work, rather than limiting them to isolated tasks.

The work around Dell AI Factory could also extend to connections for ChatGPT Enterprise and other API-based products. Areas under consideration include data preparation, management of systems of record, testing and deployment of AI applications integrated with a company's hybrid or on-premises Dell infrastructure.

Adoption path

For customers, the partnership is intended to provide a path to deploying Codex closer to enterprise data and systems while keeping organisational controls in place. The goal is to support a wider range of software development and knowledge-work use cases by giving AI systems access to more governed internal information.

The arrangement also highlights how hardware and infrastructure suppliers are trying to position themselves as key intermediaries in AI adoption inside large organisations. Rather than offering only compute and storage, vendors are increasingly linking their platforms with model providers and application developers to make internal deployment easier.

Dell described the agreement as a way to combine its enterprise IT infrastructure footprint with OpenAI's agent-focused software. Ihab Tarazi, senior vice president and chief technology officer of Dell's Infrastructure Solutions Group, said the partnership is designed to let customers use AI agents where their data already sits.

"Collaborating with OpenAI brings together Dell's industry-leading enterprise grade infrastructure with cutting edge agentic AI harnesses and models from OpenAI. The Dell AI Factory with OpenAI Codex will allow enterprises to deploy AI where enterprise data already lives, within their premises, giving customers a practical, secure path to deploying AI agents at scale," Tarazi said.