Dell Faceplants On Revenue But BLASTS Guidance With BIGLY $31.5B AI Target… (Shares Soar)

“AI? What does it stand for?”

Michael Dell: All In… 

Dell had one job this quarter: don’t embarrass yourself. They sort of succeeded. Sure, revenue missed by a hair, but the real story is that Dell basically walked onto the earnings call holding a giant sign that said “AI saved our ass again.” And Wall Street, in its eternal quest to pretend it’s surprised by anything anymore, rewarded them for it.

(Source: Giphy)

In short, Dell has become this weird barometer for how serious the AI infrastructure cycle actually is. You never start a conversation talking about Dell, but you end up mentioning them the moment someone asks, “Okay, but who’s actually building all the racks Jensen keeps bragging about?” This quarter was exactly that. They printed $27.01B in revenue… a bean counting error away from expectations… but then immediately shoved all attention to Q4 for extra credit. Suddenly they’re guiding $31.5B for next quarter primarily because AI server demand went from “pretty good” to “we’re gonna need a bigger boat.” 

(Source: CNBC) 

Whereas now, Dell’s server shipments for the year are expected to hit $25B instead of $20B. A $5 billion “oh btw.” They also somehow sold $5.6B of AI server gear in one quarter, which explains why Jensen Huang probably sleeps fine at night despite Michael Burry & Co. raising pitchforks at him inside a $379/year Substack newsletter. But alas, other than that, everything about Dell's earnings looked exactly how you’d expect: Infrastructure Solutions Group was up (obviously), the PC division is still limping along (also obviously), and Dell continues pretending that laptops are a business worth talking about while AI compute steals the show.

That said, Dell isn’t even selling heavily to hyperscalers. Those guys vacuum up GPUs directly from Nvidia like they’re buying in bulk at Costco. Dell’s customers are the “other big fish” (think governments, enterprises, and the newly invented category of “neoclouds”). And yet… Dell is still outperforming nearly everyone not named Super Micro. That’s how absurd the market is right now. Simply being adjacent to Nvidia is a business model.

(Source: Giphy) 

Meanwhile, Dell spent $1.6B on buybacks because that’s the ritual offering required to keep shareholders from asking questions like “Why do we still make consumer laptops again?” So yeah… nothing flashy here. Just a company quietly making ungodly amounts of money selling shovel-equivalent hardware in the biggest compute gold rush of our lives. If anything, Dell just reminded everyone of the same truth we keep relearning every quarter: AI is the trade. Infrastructure is the backbone. And Dell, despite being the least sexy name in the whole damn sector, is right there cashing the checks. Until next time, friends… 

At the time of publishing, Stocks.News holds positions in Dell as mentioned in the article.