Dell spent years being valued as a maker of laptops and storage boxes, a solid, unexciting business in a mature market. The AI build-out has rewritten that story in a single quarter.
The company’s shares have climbed around 40% across the run into and out of its latest results, after record numbers and a raised forecast confirmed that the demand for Nvidia-powered servers is still accelerating.
For the first quarter of its 2027 fiscal year, ended in late April, Dell reported record revenue of $43.8 billion, up 88% on a year earlier, and non-GAAP earnings per share of $4.86, more than triple the prior year.
The earnings figure cleared the roughly $2.93 analysts had penciled in by a wide margin, the kind of beat that resets expectations rather than merely meeting them.
The engine is the Infrastructure Solutions Group, the division that builds the AI servers enterprises and cloud providers are buying to run large models. ISG revenue reached $29 billion, up 181%, and within it Dell recognised $16.1 billion of AI server revenue while booking $24.4 billion in fresh AI orders.
