Dell reported its fastest pace of revenue growth since returning to the public market in 2018, with total revenue reaching $43.84 billion for the quarter ending May 1, according to CNBC. That figure nearly doubled year over year, rising close to 88%. The stock climbed as much as 39% in extended trading Thursday.
Analysts had expected $35.43 billion in revenue and $2.94 in adjusted earnings per share. Dell delivered $4.86 in adjusted earnings per share, well above those estimates. Net income more than tripled to $3.44 billion, compared to $965 million a year earlier.
The growth is being driven almost entirely by artificial intelligence. Dell assembles servers containing graphics processing units from manufacturers including Nvidia, and that business is expanding rapidly. AI server revenue hit $16.1 billion for the quarter, a 757% increase from the same period a year ago. The company said it now has over 5,000 AI server customers, including neoclouds, sovereign clients, and enterprises.
Dell now projects $60 billion in full-year AI revenue, up from the $50 billion estimate it gave in February. That would represent 144% year-over-year growth. For the current quarter, the company is targeting between $44 billion and $45 billion in revenue and $4.80 in adjusted earnings per share. Analysts had been expecting $34.97 billion in revenue and $2.98 per share.
As of Thursday's market close, Dell's stock was up more than 150% for the year. The S&P 500 gained roughly 10% over the same period.
One notable shareholder benefiting from the stock surge is President Donald Trump, who became a Dell investor in the first quarter, according to filings with the U.S. Office of Government Ethics. At a White House event earlier this month, Trump said, "Go out and buy a Dell."
On Wednesday, the Pentagon announced a five-year, $9.7 billion contract with Dell for Microsoft 365 productivity services. That announcement came roughly five months after Dell CEO Michael Dell and his wife, Susan Dell, donated $6.25 billion to fund Trump Accounts for 25 million U.S. children.
The company has also been raising prices to offset higher input costs tied to a global memory shortage driven by AI demand. Jeff Clarke, Dell's vice chairman and chief operating officer, addressed that pressure directly on a conference call with analysts.
"We're repricing, it feels like, every day, and I'm sure our customers feel that pain," Clarke said. "Unfortunately, I don't see that changing, given the world that we're living in today, where you have an inflationary environment, whether it's fuel, whether it's raw materials, whether that's DRAM, whether that's NAND, CPUs. We are living in an inflationary environment that is changing at a rate that obviously we've never seen before ... and everything that we see suggests that continues."
Dell raised its forecast for the full 2027 fiscal year following the quarterly results. The prior year-over-year growth record since the company's 2018 IPO had been 39%, a mark set in the January quarter. This quarter's 88% growth more than doubled that previous high.
