Dell Technologies Inc. has landed a $150 million deal to provide computing hardware to artificial intelligence startup Imbue, a win for the technology giant as it looks to grow its footprint in the AI market. Dell is supplying Imbue with servers to enable the startup to process the vast amount of data needed to develop its AI systems and build models with advanced reasoning capabilities. Imbue, which raised $200 million in a recent funding round from firms including Nvidia Corp., is one of a handful of AI startups building their own AI foundation models from scratch—an ambitious effort that requires a large volume of computing power. “The main reason we went with Dell is that we don't want to be locked into a computing provider,” said Josh Albrecht, co-founder and chief technology officer of Imbue. If the company had gone with a larger cloud provider like Google or Amazon, he said, “it would make it much harder for the software side to move off of that in the future.