Dell Technologies is leaning hard into the AI infrastructure boom, reporting record AI server demand alongside its fiscal 2026 third-quarter results and sharply increasing its outlook for AI-related shipments this year.
While the company posted record Q3 revenue of $27 billion overall, the standout story for infrastructure buyers is in its AI server numbers. Dell Technologies now expects full-year AI server shipments to reach roughly $25 billion in fiscal 2026, an increase of more than 150% year over year, reflecting a rapid shift in customer spending from traditional compute toward accelerated infrastructure.
Jeff Clarke, vice chairman and chief operating officer at Dell Technologies, said AI momentum is accelerating in the second half of the year, citing record AI server orders of $12.3 billion in the quarter and an unprecedented $30 billion in AI server orders year to date. According to Dell, the five-quarter pipeline is “multiples” of its $18.4 billion backlog, indicating that demand is not just a short-term spike but a multi-quarter build-out cycle across different customer types.
The demand is coming from a mix of “neocloud” providers, sovereign cloud initiatives and large enterprise customers, reflecting a broader market in which hyperscale-style deployments are no longer limited to the very largest public clouds. Organizations across sectors are looking to deploy large language models, retrieval-augmented generation and inference clusters on infrastructure they can control more tightly for cost, performance and regulatory reasons.
This demand is visible in Dell’s Infrastructure Solutions Group (ISG), which delivered record third-quarter revenue of $14.1 billion, up 24% year over year. Servers and networking revenue reached a record $10.1 billion, up 37%, driven largely by AI configurations, while storage revenue was flat. ISG contributed 70% of Dell’s reportable segment operating income in the quarter, underscoring how central infrastructure has become to the company’s profitability.
Clarke attributed Dell’s AI traction to its ability to engineer bespoke high-performance systems, stand up large and complex AI clusters quickly, and provide global lifecycle support. For customers, that translates into a portfolio of GPU- and accelerator-rich platforms paired with networking, storage and services tuned for generative AI training and inference, rather than just generic x86 servers.
Dell CFO David Kennedy, newly confirmed in the role on a permanent basis, said fiscal 2026 will be “another record year” and highlighted the AI uplift as a key reason for raising revenue guidance to $111.7 billion at the midpoint, up 17% year over year. In practical terms, Dell is signaling that AI-centric infrastructure will be a core growth vector for the business, even as traditional PC and general-purpose server markets remain more cyclical.
For CIOs, CTOs and infrastructure architects, the results reinforce a clear shift: AI servers have moved from experimental line items to a primary driver of data center capex, and suppliers with the scale and integration capabilities to deliver full AI stacks are positioning themselves at the center of that spend.
Executive Insights FAQ
How significant is Dell’s AI server order momentum?
The company has booked $30 billion in AI server orders year to date, with $12.3 billion in the latest quarter alone. That volume, plus a five-quarter pipeline that Dell says is multiples of its $18.4 billion backlog, indicates a multi-year investment cycle rather than a one-off surge.
What types of customers are driving Dell’s AI infrastructure growth?
Dell points to a mix of neocloud providers, sovereign cloud projects and large enterprises. That suggests AI infrastructure demand is broadening beyond hyperscale public clouds to include regional cloud players and regulated organizations that need more control over data and workloads.
How does this AI focus show up in Dell’s infrastructure segment numbers?
Dell’s Infrastructure Solutions Group reported $14.1 billion in revenue, up 24% year over year, with servers and networking up 37% to $10.1 billion. Given relatively flat storage revenue, the growth is clearly weighted toward compute and networking for AI-heavy configurations.
What does Dell mean by “bespoke high-performance solutions” for AI?
It refers to custom-engineered AI clusters that combine GPUs or other accelerators, high-bandwidth interconnects, tuned storage and management software into full-stack systems. These are often designed around the specific model types, data characteristics and scaling needs of individual customers, rather than off-the-shelf servers.
How should enterprise buyers interpret Dell’s raised AI shipment guidance?
The guidance of roughly $25 billion in AI server shipments, up more than 150% year over year, signals that AI-ready infrastructure is now central to Dell’s roadmap and capacity planning. For buyers, it means expanding choice and availability of AI-optimized systems, but also a competitive market where securing GPU capacity and integration expertise early may be critical to hitting their own AI deployment timelines.
