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Every so often a stock stops being the thing investors thought it was.
For most of the past decade, Dell Technologies (DELL) was a name people owned without thinking about it much. It sold laptops to school districts and servers to mid-sized banks, threw off cash, and traded at the multiple the market reserves for companies it expects to grow slowly and predictably forever.
That reputation was fair. Dell went private in 2013, returned to public markets in 2018, and spent years getting described as a hardware business in a software world.
Then artificial intelligence (AI) showed up, and the unglamorous part of Dell's business turned out to be the part that mattered. Somebody has to build the machines that run the models, wire them, cool them and service them.
