Dell Technologies World 2025 | Varun Chhabra, Dell Technologies & Jae Won Kim, Elice

Clips
More from Dell Technologies World 2025

Jae Won Kim

CEO

Elice

Varun Chhabra

SVP, ISG Product Marketing

Dell Technologies

play_circle_outline Elice: South Korea leader in AI education and cloud, serving over 7,000 organizations.

play_circle_outline Affordable AI education solutions using PMDC with Dell Technologies, reducing costs significantly.

play_circle_outline Challenges in adopting PMDC for AI training, achieving compliance and affordable access.

play_circle_outline PMDC and Dell Technologies: Revolutionizing AI Infrastructure Solutions for a Secure Private Cloud Environment

Info
Transcript

Varun Chhabra, Dell Technologies & Jae Won Kim, Elice

Jae Won Kim

CEO Elice

Varun Chhabra

SVP, ISG Product Marketing Dell Technologies

Jae Won Kim, chief executive officer at Elice Inc., and Varun Chhabra, senior vice president of product marketing, Infrastructure Solutions Group and Telecom, at Dell Technologies Inc., join theCUBE’s Savannah Peterson and Dave Vellante at Dell Technologies World 2025 to discuss how accessible AI infrastructure is transforming education. Their conversation spotlights the innovative partnership between Dell and Elice to expand AI learning opportunities across sectors.

Kim shares how Elice, building on research roots at KAIST, is democratizing AI educa... Read more

explore Keep Exploring

What does Elice offer in terms of AI education and cloud services to organizations and learners in South Korea? add

What solution did Elice and Dell partner to provide in order to make GPU environments affordable and secure for learning AI? add

What type of language model is being used for AI training in order to provide digital textbooks to millions of students in Korea? add

What are the potential benefits of providing AI in private cloud environments with a strong focus on security for governments and public sectors? add

bolt Powered by CUBE AI

Varun Chhabra, Dell Technologies & Jae Won Kim, Elice

search

>> Good afternoon, Nerd Fam, and welcome back to fabulous Las Vegas, Nevada. We're here coming to the end of Day 2 of our three days of wall-to-wall coverage on theCUBE at Dell Tech World. My name's Savannah Peterson, here with Dave Vellante for all the fun. Man, we're really having a good day.

>> Who are you calling a nerd?

>> I call myself a nerd and I know there's fellow nerds out there. Dave, nerds are having a moment right now-

>> I know. I know.

>> For the record, it's never been cooler to be a nerd-

>> Alpha nerds are... They're in vogue.

>> Yeah. No, they... Alpha nerd's in vogue. Wow. Just that sentence alone was really special. Anyway, very excited for this next conversation that we're having. Jaewon and Varun, thank you both for being here.

>> Thanks for having us.

>> Varun, this is a tradition for us now.

>> Yeah.

>> I love that we always get to have a good chat. You always bring a really exciting conversation. So I'm going to let Jaewon chime in a little bit and tell us about Elice in case the audience isn't familiar.

>> All right. Elice is South Korea leader in AI education and cloud, serving over 7,000 organizations and over 2.7 million learners-

>> Wow....

>> and researchers nationwide.

>> All 2.7 million of those people are actively using AI to learn right now?

>> They're accumulated learners in Korea and we're providing two solutions to provide AI education. So Elice learning experience platform provide personalized learning for digital AI and Elice Cloud power up the GPU infrastructure to provide the AI infrastructure.

>> And you were founded mid last decade before the AI awakening-

>> I know there's-...

>> around the world-...

>> a neat narrative there, for sure.

>> Yes.

>> So what was the founding premise of the company?

>> So I was a PhD candidate at KAIST which is a engineering school in Korea. We were doing AI and education research for 10 years now. It was our research project. And obviously, a lot of students struggle to learn programming, AI, so we wanted to build the efficient platform to help these students.

>> Wow. So how do you figure out what to develop next in terms of these types of learning programs? I would imagine everyone wants to use this tool. There's got to be a little bit of competition for a priority there.

>> Yeah. So basically when you learn AI, you basically need GPUs obviously and GPUs are very expensive. So in order to provide affordable and at the same time very secure environment, we had to figure out some kind of solution to provide very cheap GPU environments. And obviously here, Elice partnership with Dell to provide very affordable, portable, modular data center. We call it PMDC.

>> Okay. Smart.

>> Yes. And we call it AI PMDC to power up these GPUs. Very affordable. At the same time, very secure.

>> Wow. Okay. So Varun, how long have you been working with Elice?

>> It's been a few years now, actually, and I've been so excited to have this conversation with Jaewon because two things. One is we keep talking about the transformative capability of AI. And oftentimes, the conversation is about corporations and what we can do, which is of course a real thing. But ultimately, the examples that Elice and Jaewon brought to market with helping learners of all ages basically be able to learn AI assistance for textbooks. I mean, when I heard about this, it's just so incredible. So I think that's the first thing that's bringing the impact and actually democratizing the capabilities of AI to everybody. That's so amazing. And then, the other thing that's as we learn... As we work more with Elice is Jaewon and his team are technology pioneers. Really, really at the forefront of doing innovation on the technical front as well, not just with education. So the PMDC that they work with, it's been a close collaboration with us. Modular data centers which house GPU racks, latest greatest technology from Nvidia, so it's built on the AI factory with Nvidia. And talking to Jaewon, you guys are really at the forefront of cutting-edge Nvidia technology. Liquid cooling, the latest GPUs, and the unique designs that Elice has brought is actually now seeing demand in other areas. So they are actually looking at PMDCs as a business itself. So it's a really, really incredible story of something that's aimed at helping society. But then, the technical innovation that's come through the effort is actually being looked at now across the board in different industries. Yes.

>> This is a very mature case study. You guys are well on your way.

>> 10 years. Yeah.

>> Yeah. I mean, far... Yeah. That's impressive. Go ahead.

>> Why didn't you just do this in the cloud?

>> That's a good point. Basically, we looked up the solution in public cloud service and basically it was out of budget for education services. So in order to make this affordable, we actually introduced the Dell PMDC and it actually reduced the cost to 80%, if you compare it to the public cloud services. And if you compare that to colocation, on-premise, we still reduce that up to 40% to 50%. Reason why is portable modular data center in Korea can be constructed very cheaply and also there are many regulations around these GPUs. But for PMDC, we could kind of make it very agile. So the infrastructure is way affordable and accessible than regular cloud service provider.

>> And then, just to add to that, one of the other key points of the design as Jaewon was telling me this morning was really the data and the requirement, because this is education, right? There's a lot of requirements from the Ministry of Education and around keeping the data sovereign.

>> Exactly.

>> That is a big part of the value proposition of doing this on-premises.

>> Yes.

>> Okay. So there was basically a compliance to an edict. The data couldn't leave the country. Is that right? Or the region or-

>> Yes, not just leaving but also we need to comply with all these requirements from the government. So in order to provide the compliance and redundancies that government requires, we have to provide customizable on-premise solution and PMDC with Dell Technology is perfect for this case.

>> Now, because you had to lay out the CapEx but you made the business case to say, "Okay. That pays for itself and crossover at some point in time or whatever that is," that... But it's so alluring to just start in the cloud. You drip, drip, drip, and then all of a sudden... Right? So what was that conversation like? Was it an easy conversation or was it a big debate? Like some folks, developers maybe wanted to go to the cloud. How did you come to that decision? It's fascinating to me.

>> Yes. So basically at the time, like back and four years ago, it was just the 800 got introduced from Nvidia and these Nvidia chip requires high electricity density, like high power consumption. And all the data center constructed like 10 years ago, they cannot host it, like colocate these very high electricity density GPU servers. So because we couldn't really host it, these GPU servers, we had to figure out some other way and PMDC was the only solution in Korea.

>> Amazing.

>> So that's why it's still a only solution for liquid cooling, because all these data center built in Asia is very old. They're not up to technologies that we want. So PMDC is the only solution for direct liquid cooling and cutting edge Dell servers.

>> What was it like to adopt that? I mean, what were the sort of challenges in adopting it? Any advice that you would share with others trying to do similar initiatives?

>> So basically, cloud service provider, they really have a lot of compliances and redundancies that they need to require. For us, we are using this for AI training research. So instead of tiering up with these high tier requirements, we kind of lower it down to very customizable AI training and learning. So in this way, we reduce the cost a lot and make it more affordable and accessible for education and research field.

>> And when you say AI training, are you building your own language models? Are they large language models, small language models? How are they being used?

>> So as I explained earlier, we are providing AI digital textbook to 5 million student in Korea. And in order to meet the requirements from the government, we have to build our own language model inside of our PMDC. And these requirements, we comply with the government. So I mean, PMDC was very helpful to train new LLMs and as well as providing it to our student in Korea.

>> So let's talk a little bit about that. This is a huge project you're undertaking. It's not just the technology here, but your ability to educate people about AI using AI. I mean, this conversation is actually quite meta which is quite fun. Can you give us a window into what the experience is like for the learner on the other side?

>> Right.

>> Yeah.

>> So basically, a lot of student cannot formulate the questions. So a lot of questions are, "I don't know." It's not solid questions. So because our solution has a lot of information around students, we can help them to give proper questions and answers. That's one thing. And secondly, obviously, there is a lot of compliance that government requires for us to do. Some of the answers must meet their requirements-

>> Right. Big deal. It's a very important thing.

>> Exactly. So all these things, we have to deliver inside of a nation so that's why PMDC is very helpful for that.

>> So your business model, you train the model, and then you make it available to these millions of students.

>> Yes.

>> So your business model, it's a SaaS service or-

>> It is SaaS service. So our education solution is SaaS service. From education service, now we are expanding that to GPU cloud service. So just like Amazon was doing e-commerce and now they're doing AWS, we're doing education and we're providing the GPU cloud to other institutions. Yeah.

>> And they are doing inference as well, I presume, in this, right?

>> Yeah.

>> Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, there's an AI-powered chatbot that's connected to the digital textbooks that assist the end users and the students. So they are basically... Inference is a big part of what you're doing right now, right, Jaewon?

>> Yes, it is.

>> So how often did you-

>> Well, and that makes it real for the learners.

>> Yes. Exactly.

>> That's the key.

>> How often do you do a YOLO training run and what is that like?

>> Yeah. So every time... So AI is just going too fast. Every month, there's new model. Every day, there is new data. So it is very difficult to operate these new LLMs and meet the new data, so it's just happening every day.

>> Okay. So it's not like a big bang, one shot, "We're going to do a training run. We're ready. Let's go." It's really-

>> It's a continuous job. Continuous job, so that's why we need sustainable and affordable GPU environments and that's happening with the PMDC with Dell Technologies.

>> Which is awesome. Do you use Elice to learn yourself?

>> Huh. Interesting question. Yes, I actually do sometimes now. Beforehand, it was very basic programming and AI, which I knew already. Nowadays, there are some new things coming out like MCP, A2A, all these new technologies coming out. So I learn from my platform.

>> That's got to feel really cool-

>> Jaewon has promised me to give me a license as well. I just need to learn Korean before that.

>> Yeah.

>> Yes.

>> What are your thoughts? What are your takeaways on MCP? Particularly interested in what you're thinking, how you're thinking about the security model for MCP.

>> So it's different by the country. In South Korea, we are still having cloud transformation. There are some countries behind these cloud transformation. If you're not in the cloud infrastructure, MCP is quite slow adoption. So we are worried about security. At the same time, we need to do more adoption for cloud environment, so we are doing that in both ways. And obviously, PMDC is very good for a secured environment, because you can isolate physically from the data center. So if you want to host private cloud, then PMDC is the best solution for now.

>> Wow. So-

>> Okay. But it's... And MCP, it sounds like it's still in the early stages of experimentation-

>> It is-

>> And then, that leads-

>> It would only take a couple months-

>> I know. A couple months-

>> Yeah. I mean, great that we are moving in an insane velocity-...

>> but that's like in years in this AI era-...

>> but no one knew what that acronym meant in 2024-

>> It's-...

>> .

>> Right. We were talking about chatbots. Okay. And that sets up though agentic. How are you thinking about the agents in your business and supporting your mission?

>> That's an interesting question. I think it'll be very helpful to provide agentic AI in private cloud as well and in very secure environment. Obviously, the government has to comply with a lot of security issues. So providing this secure environment and GPU infrastructure to provide these agents are very beneficial for governments and public sectors.

>> What could Dell do to make your life better?

>> Right now, PMDC is kind of new tech. It's a new way of delivering AI infrastructure. I mean, AI factory for Dell Technology is very exciting and I think PMDC can help AI factory more spread out outside of Korea. So right now, we want to go outside of Korea, APEC area, even the US. So I mean, Dell Technologies partnership, we can do global. Come on-

>> Yeah. I mean... I know. I was just going to say, you are more than welcome.

>> It's an incredible opportunity because one of the themes of this show is, "Well, how do you upgrade your data centers for the cooling and power requirements?" And the model that Jaewon and Elice have with the PMDC, with these modular data centers. Up to 10 racks, I think you said, in a single container, right? 10 racks of GPUs. And they are working on the latest for Blackwell and liquid cooling, which means we're going to be able to back a lot of GPU computational capability into one modular data center. I mean, I think it's a really, really untapped market, if you will, for people who are maybe looking to adopt the latest technology. But then, the capital outlay for retrofitting your entire data center is maybe prohibitive-

>> Prohibitive. Yeah. Right.

>> Yes. Well, so this is a fun way to bring this interview to a close. So Varun, I know you have an 11-year-old son at home, say hello-

>> He reminds me 12, almost 12-

>> Oh, 12 now-

>> Almost 12.

>> Almost 12. Okay. I was like, "Shoot. I thought I heard you right-"

>> Yeah. You did. You're right, 11.

>> What do you hope that when Elice comes over to the United States and we get to adopt the technology ourselves, what do you think your son will be most excited to use this tool to learn?

>> First of all, I have to say, Savannah, since you brought this up, you are a very popular member in our household, because I've been coming to many, many Dell Tech worlds and I've done many Cube interviews. My family has never seen a single one. But last year, because of your callout to my family, they are actively watching this live. So I don't know if this is a strategy on your behalf to increase the viewership of theCUBE-

>> Hi....

>> but it's working

>> Two viewers at a time. We're trying to just build that live audience. I'll take it-

>> Brick by brick-

>> Absolutely.

>> We're very grateful for that.

>> So look, I think the transformative power of AI to education, I just can't think of a better example than this. And the fact that Elice is doing this at a scale of millions of learners-

>> It's so impressive.

>> It's just so incredible, right?

>> Seriously.

>> There's so much innovation happening in education. I don't know of anybody who has already scaled this to millions of users. It's just incredible. So I think everybody... We were talking about this before we started recording. Over the last few years, there's been so much recognition about people having different ways of learning and different needs for different students. And AI, I think, is finally going to make that real, right? The customized, personalized education, which I think we can all agree, is going to just make everybody a better student. It's going to increase the amount of knowledge across the world. I mean, I can't wait for Jaewon's platform to start beyond computer science, to do science and math and language and stuff-

>> Yes.

>> Oh, totally.

>> It will be so incredible. I think it'll be a huge unlock for students around the world. Yeah.

>> I mean, and what an amazing proof point. Seriously impressive. As you were sharing these numbers and looking at this, I'm deeply impressed honestly-

>> Thank you so much.

>> I am stoked. We got to get you over here so we can all start to play with it. Last question for you, gentlemen. When we're hanging out at Dell Tech World 2026, what do you hope to be able to say then that you can't yet say today day?

>> So obviously, we're targeting education industry right now. But we're expanding beyond the education industry, so finance or medical, all these kind of area. Even military, all these private clouds requirements are needed. These industries, we can deliver PMDCs with Dell Technology. So I hope to showcase a lot of use cases with this PMDC and cloud technologies that we provide.

>> Awesome. Well, we look forward to telling those stories. All right. Varun, what about you? What do you want to be able to say?

>> Look, I think what is so incredibly exciting about stories like Elice is the promise of AI becomes real. In this case, it's education. You can go industry by industry and everybody can see it and they're starting to maybe grasp it. What I would love to see a year from now is every organization has at least one example of like, "Oh yeah, this has made things better for us." Either internal stakeholders, external stakeholders, or the world at large. I mean, it's happening in front of our eyes. It's incredible.

>> It really is. I'm so glad we get to be a part of this together-

>> Yeah. Absolutely.

>> Cool story, guys. Congratulations-

>> It's so much fun. Yeah. Thank you both so much for making the time-

>> Thank you for having us-

>> And it's always a thank you, Dave-

>> Thank you for having us. Yeah.

>> And thank you to Varun's family for making me feel like a celebrity here on this show. We appreciate all of you tuning in wherever you might be. We're here in Las Vegas, Nevada at Dell Tech world. My name's Savannah Peterson. You're watching theCUBE, the leading source for enterprise tech news.