Dell Technologies is shipping $1.5 billion of AI hardware every week, and its earnings per share in the quarter rose more than 200% from a year earlier.
The AI build-out is usually told as a story about graphics processors. Of the $25 billion Dell added to its full-year revenue guidance, $11 billion is for equipment that has nothing to do with them.
"Yeah. Look, I think it's undeniable now that the appetite for infrastructure has gone beyond the GPU."
David Kennedy is the chief financial officer who signed those numbers, and he came on the same evening Dell released them and raised the year's revenue guidance to $192 billion.
I listened to the full segment so you can skip it.
Here are the 6 takeaways that matter.
👤 Guest: David Kennedy, chief financial officer of Dell Technologies, on the evening the company reported its second quarter
🎙️ Host: Jim Cramer, who hosts Mad Money and runs the charitable trust behind the CNBC Investing Club
📰 Published: 1 September 2026 on CNBC (Mad Money w/ Jim Cramer)
🟢 Spotify | 🟣 Apple Podcasts | 🔗 CNBC | ⏱️ 8 min
Key Takeaways
The demand Dell is seeing has moved past the graphics processor $11 billion of the $25 billion guidance raise is traditional servers, storage and networking
Traditional server revenue grew 122%, and Dell is guiding to triple-digit growth for the whole second half
Demand is still running ahead of what Dell can build Kennedy says the 122% growth number understates the orders, because supply is the constraint
Storage has grown faster than its market for six consecutive quarters
6,500 customers started an AI factory with Dell in the quarter, up almost 60% in six months Kennedy says these are new customers, not the same ones buying again
Dell shifted supply out of PCs and into servers three or four months ago
1. The quarter in one number
Cramer opened on the earnings line rather than on the AI narrative, quoting the company's founder back at him. "A wise man, Michael Dell, once said there's an old Texas saying I might have just made up. If you keep growing earnings per share 200% plus year over year, something good will happen."
Kennedy answered with four records in one sentence. "Record revenue, 58% growth. Our EPS of $7.04 in q2 up over 200%. And obviously a shareholder return record, also of $4.3 billion."
The AI order book is the number he wanted the audience to hold. "Look at AI server $61 billion of demand in q2. If we're keeping count, that's $132 billion and a 12 month trailing assessment. And we're now shipping $1.5 billion of AI every single week."
That is what paid for the raise. "It's this acceleration. It gives us the confidence to take up our guide to $192 billion for the year up 25 billion." On the earnings guidance he added, "And like you said that EPS number 2550 which is almost equal to the last three years combined."
Cramer called it a monumental beat and said that if any other company had reported it, the market would have treated it as one
2. Beyond the GPU
Cramer said he had not expected on-premises demand for ordinary servers to hold up, and asked how it was possible.
Kennedy said the appetite has spread past the accelerator. "Yeah. Look, I think it's undeniable now that the appetite for infrastructure has gone beyond the GPU." He put four things behind it: inference workloads, agent activity, the ordinary modernization of the data center, and new cybersecurity work Each of those, he said, drives central-processor demand, which in turn drives networking and storage demand
The split inside the raise is the evidence. "If you look at our $25 billion increase in guide today, $11 billion that is beyond the GPU. It's traditional server. We grew 122% in q2, and we're guiding for the full second half of the year, triple digit growth, and then storage, which is my personal highlight for the for the quarter growing 26%."
He said the whole portfolio is moving, not one product. "The demand is there and it's across the entire portfolio."
3. Demand runs past supply
Cramer asked about the higher memory-chip prices everyone in the industry had absorbed, and whether Dell's customers were pushing back on price. Kennedy did not address chip pricing directly. He answered on volume instead.
His framing is that Dell cannot make enough of them. "Look, I think it's important to kind of call out demand was greater than supply in the server side."
The growth rate understates the orders. "So as much as we celebrate the 122% growth, demand is higher." He said supply is tight and Dell continues to look for more of it
What he takes from that is breadth rather than a single hot product. He said the growth holds by geography, by customer vertical and by customer segment, with all boats rising
4. Ten points of server share
Kennedy said the growth is share as well as market. "Oh yeah, for sure. If you look at our traditional server space, almost ten points a share in the first half of the year." He attributed it to execution — the supply chain, the product teams and the sales teams — and to discipline on operations and pricing
Storage is the part he singled out himself. "We're now six quarters in a row of demand growth faster than the market."
On the supply chain, the specific move he described was moving capacity between businesses. "I think we have the best supply chain in the industry, and I think they're doing a great job as we as we go through a broad portfolio." "One example, Jim, to take you through would be at the start of the year, maybe 3 or 4 months ago. Seeing the slight pressure on the pc side, we did shift some of our supply." He said that shift is a big part of the second-half guidance, and that being able to move supply across a portfolio that runs from PCs to complex data-center designs is the asset in conditions like these
5. 6,500 new AI factories
Cramer read out a line from Dell's Jeff Clarke — that customers no longer see the IT environment simply as a cost center but as a value driver that enables growth, productivity and competitive advantage — and said that in a career in the business he had not seen that change before.
Kennedy's version of the same point runs through tokens. "Tokens are driving more data, data needs compute, and ultimately the data needs to go somewhere from a storage perspective." "I think our latest intelligence shows almost 3600 quadrillion tokens by 2030."
The customer count is the number the segment was titled on. "Yeah. Look, if you look at our q2 performance, we saw 6500 customers launched their AI factories with us. That's up almost 60% in the last six months. That's not original customers. This is brand new customers buying into this productivity curve that's happening."
Cramer put it to him that companies buying this equipment are no longer the money-losers of the last cycle, and are spending because they expect large profits in 2027 or 2028. Kennedy would not date the payback, and answered on the first token instead. "I think the key here is getting to that first token, getting that monetization that's there and driving the activities you drive, scale and activity."
On whether this costs jobs, he said it is a mix of both. He pointed at Dell itself, which he said is the most efficient it has been in its 42-year history
6. Cash back to shareholders
Cramer noted the buyback and asked whether there is more capacity behind it. Kennedy said the cash flow follows the revenue. "Yeah for sure. Look, ultimately you accelerate the revenue profile in our cash conversion cycle. You're going to accelerate the cash flow from that."
The pace of return, in his own words: "It's up almost two and a half x quarter on quarter. That shows our diligence and our commitment to that going forward. And you won't see any change in posture from us."
Bonus Insights
Cramer used this quarter twice in the same programme as evidence against the day's selloff: he said in his opening monologue that Dell's numbers should change people's minds about the company and possibly about technology generally, and that they still would not be enough to lift the market
Cramer's verdict on the print, in the sign-off: "David Kennedy is CFO of Dell Technologies. Again, maybe the best quarter of 2026."
Cramer's own market analysis, his case for a much larger Nvidia buyback, and the interviews with CrowdStrike and Palo Alto Networks from the same programme are written up separately
Kennedy's bottom line is that Dell's quarter was not an AI-accelerator story with an ordinary business attached to it, but a portfolio in which servers, storage and networking are all growing because the accelerators exist.
Products, Companies & Tools Mentioned
Dell Technologies (Kennedy's employer, which reported record revenue up 58%, earnings per share of $7.04 and a raised full-year guide of $192 billion)
Dell AI Factory (The packaged offering Kennedy says 6,500 customers started with Dell in the quarter, up almost 60% in six months)
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