Dell Technologies (DELL) Founder and CEO Michael Dell believes rumors of declining AI spending are greatly exaggerated.
“There are always bumps in the road when you launch a rocket and you create new capabilities. You have new product cycles. You launch new things. And some customers want the existing ones to be available faster. Others want to wait for the new ones. We have all of that,” Dell told Yahoo Finance at the Citi TMT conference in New York on Wednesday.
“But the macro picture here is very, very clear, and that is that there is tremendous demand. It is growing. It extends from hyperscalers to service providers, to enterprises, to commerce, to sovereign AI, to embedded AI, to the edge, to retail, to manufacturing, to your PC, here, there and everywhere,” he added.
Dell’s second quarter underscored why the tech titan’s stock has gained an impressive 45% year to date, in part because it is seen as a key player in building America’s AI infrastructure.
The company said it made $3.1 billion in AI server sales during the quarter, nearly double the $1.7 billion it made in the previous quarter.
Sales at the company’s Infrastructure Solutions Group (ISG) jumped 38% to $11.65 billion. AI sales are captured in the ISG segment.
Dell’s Client Solutions group, which includes PC and notebook sales, saw sales fall 4 percent to $12.41 billion. Consumer sales fell 22 percent to $1.86 billion, while commercial sales were flat at $10.6 billion.
“What organizations see is a historic opportunity to make their businesses much more productive and efficient, while at the same time reimagining them through all of these capabilities,” said Dell, who founded the company in 1984.
Overall, the stock market remains bullish on Dell stock because of its exposure to AI and because it looks too cheap to ignore.
“Combining the medium-term revenue opportunity (for AI) – which increases visibility on double-digit revenue growth for the core business, and the continued focus on operating expenses, we see a robust earnings growth trajectory (for Dell) that is not fully appreciated in the 13x P/E multiple the stock currently trades at,” JPMorgan analyst Samik Chatterjee said in a client note.
Chatterjee reiterated an overweight rating on Dell shares, equivalent to a buy.
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