What Did Dell Stock Investors Miss Before The Run

Shares of Dell Technologies (DELL) returned 274.5% in the twelve months to October 12, 2026, easily outpacing the 17.3% return for the S&P 500. That climb centered on servers, particularly the hardware Dell builds for artificial intelligence, along with related storage equipment. Investors who missed the rally might wonder if they could have anticipated it. How early did Dell's own reports show it?

Dell Had The Pipeline Well Before The Revenue

The earliest clear signal arrived during Dell's fiscal Q3 2025 earnings call, held on November 26, 2024. Executives posted revenue of $24.4 billion, representing a 10% increase, and credited the growth to the infrastructure group that sells servers and storage. They noted the sales pipeline for the next five quarters had expanded by more than 50% from the previous quarter across all customer categories.

Actual sales took longer to materialize. Revenue growth decelerated to 7.2% in fiscal Q4 2025 and slipped further to 5.1% in fiscal Q1 2026. By April 2025, the stock had lost 28% so far that year, a decline that a Motley Fool article attributed to tepid quarterly results and tariff worries.

Confirmation finally came with the fiscal Q2 2026 results, which executives discussed on an August 28, 2025 call before filing them on September 8, 2025. Revenue for that quarter reached $29.8 billion, rising 19.0% from a year earlier. That filing appeared a month before October 9, 2025, the start of the twelve months measured here. The market did not wait. The stock had already returned 99.6% in the six months before that date. The early signs were genuine. The stock had already roughly doubled in the six months to October 2025, and it then rose another 274.5% over the next twelve months.

Most Dell Revenue Now Comes From Servers And Storage

Dell's infrastructure group generated a record $31.8 billion in fiscal Q2 2027, reflecting an 89% increase. The company posted total revenue of $47 billion that quarter, meaning servers and storage made up about two-thirds of it. That single unit now books more sales in a quarter than the entire company managed when executives first highlighted the pipeline in November 2024.

Over the twelve months to October 12, 2026, Dell also heavily outperformed the two other hardware manufacturers: Hewlett Packard Enterprise stock returned 172.7%, and HP stock returned 16.4%.

Are Dell's AI Server Orders Still Building?

Yes, as of Dell's latest report. During the fiscal Q2 2027 call held on September 1, 2026, executives announced that Dell booked a record $60.9 billion of AI server orders in the quarter. The company recognized $16.4 billion of AI server revenue over those same three months. By the end of the quarter, the AI backlog of undelivered orders reached a record $95 billion.

Executives added that the sales pipeline continued to expand from the prior quarter and remains several times the size of that backlog. The company similarly pointed to a growing pipeline back in November 2024.

A shortage of parts presents a challenge, however. The company identified memory chips as its main constraint and noted that demand for traditional servers outstripped supply.

The crucial metric to watch in Dell's next report is AI server revenue. The company forecast $19 billion for the fiscal third quarter, up from $16.4 billion in the second. Posting a figure at or above that forecast would indicate the backlog is successfully converting into sales, while a figure below it would show that conversion slowing.

Does This Mean You Should Act On DELL?

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