Hardware’s back: AI supercharges server, PC and memory sales
THIS WEEK IN ENTERPRISE by
Hardware firms are cleaning up bigtime as enterprises and cloud providers can’t get enough computing power for their artificial intelligence dreams.
Dell Technology’s stock rocketed an incredible 31% in morning trading Friday. That’s thanks to an almost unheard-of 88% jump in revenue for a established company of this size, thanks to all the AI servers it’s selling. NetApp got a similar if more muted benefit for the same reason, and so did HP‘s PC sales. This week both Micron and SK hynix also saw their market caps pass $1 trillion thanks to all the memory chips lodged in those AI servers.
Even software-as-a-service companies are faring well considering investors still worry about AI agents eating their lunch, by embracing AI themselves. The marquee story here is Snowflake, whose stock jumped 36% Thursday thanks to strong earnings and another big deal to buy compute from Amazon Web Services, signaling confidence in its future as a prime data nexus for the AI era. MongoDB, Salesforce, UiPath and others also seemed to counter fears of a SaaSpocalypse, though some of them still gave investors pause given muted forecasts.
