Dell’s server sales are riding high off of cloud and AI investment

Dell’s latest quarterly results have surpassed Wall Street’s expectations, driven by an 80% rise in server sales largely attributed to business and cloud storage provider interest in artificial intelligence ( AI ).

Per CNBC , Dell’s net income has climbed to $841 million from $455 million versus last year, while overall revenue for the quarter, $25.06 billion, saw a 9% increase from $22.93 billion this time last year.

These upward trends chime with AI’s stranglehold on the tech industry, and Dell isn’t the only company seeing them. Days previously, HP announced its own Q3 performance results , including a 2% rise in net revenue and “a return to revenue growth” for the company, citing the release of a range of AI-powered PCs .

Dell’s AI PC dominance

Dell has become one of the largest vendors for AI-equipped servers that use reliable hardware, such as Nvidia’s own Blackwell chip range , set to suit “trillion-parameter scale generative AI” purposes.

Back in May 2024 at this year’s Dell Technologies World conference, Dell CEO Michael Dell and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang made a j oint announcement of an ‘AI factory’ , combining server production with a “generative AI solution for digital assistants” to help businesses to deploy AI chatbots .

Given the scale of this operation across hardware and software production and deployment, it’s perhaps no surprise that Dell’s Chief Operating Officer Jeff Clarke was, per CNBC , quoted on the latest earnings call as saying that “we are competing in all of the big AI deals and are winning significant deployments at scale,” and going so far as to disclose a backlog of $3.8 billion’s worth of unfulfilled AI server orders.

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