Dell Technologies (DELL) closed Friday up 32.76%, its best single-day performance since returning to public markets in 2018, after the company delivered first-quarter fiscal 2027 results that left Wall Street’s forecasts looking almost comically conservative.
Revenue hit a record $43.8bn, up 88% year on year, while non-GAAP diluted EPS came in at $4.86, up 214%. Analysts had pencilled in a profit of $2.88 per share on revenue of $34.81bn – a miss of historic proportions in the other direction.
The Infrastructure Solutions Group generated record revenue of $29bn, up 181%, with AI-optimised server revenue reaching $16.1bn – a 757% increase from the same period a year ago.
Dell booked $24.4bn in AI orders during the quarter, leaving it with a backlog of $51.3bn. That figure gives the company exceptional near-term revenue visibility and removes much of the uncertainty that had lingered around the sustainability of demand.
Chief Operating Officer Jeff Clarke left little room for ambiguity. “The AI opportunity shows no signs of slowing,” he said, and the numbers back that up.
Full-year revenue is now expected to come in at around $167bn, with $60bn of that attributable to AI server sales alone. That compares with prior guidance of $138bn to $142bn, against a consensus estimate of $143.9bn – a raise of roughly $27bn at the midpoint.
For the second quarter, Dell guided revenue of $44bn to $45bn with adjusted EPS of $4.80, against a consensus of $3.01 on $35.4bn in revenue. The scale of the beat will force a significant recalibration across the Street.
Shares are now up 229% in 2026, and Friday’s move narrowly eclipsed the previous record one-day gain of 31.6% set in March 2024. Cash flow from operations reached $4.1bn in the quarter, with the company returning $2.1bn to shareholders.
Morgan Stanley analyst Erik Woodring acknowledged the print had caught his team off guard, with the beat-and-raise described as a “massive” surprise.
Dell now counts more than 5,000 AI customers, up over 50% in just six months, spanning neo-cloud, sovereign, and enterprise categories.
Traditional server and networking revenue also surged 92%, with demand outpacing supply across all regions – a constraint that, if eased, could push revenues even higher in coming quarters.
The PC market remains under pressure from elevated memory chip prices, though overall global shipments rose in the quarter, with Dell trailing only HP and Lenovo in market share. The consumer hardware business, once the defining story for the company, is now very much the supporting act.
