Dell Technologies - Earnings Call - Q2 2026

Executive Summary

• Dell delivered record Q2 FY26 revenue of $29.78B (+19% YoY) and record non-GAAP EPS of $2.32 (+19% YoY), with GAAP EPS of $1.70 (+38% YoY).
• Results were modestly above Wall Street consensus: revenue $29.19B* vs actual $29.78B and EPS $2.29* vs actual $2.32; EBITDA was below consensus ($2.97B* vs actual $2.74B*). Values retrieved from S&P Global.
• Management raised FY26 revenue guidance to $105–$109B (midpoint $107B) and non-GAAP EPS to $9.55 ± $0.25, and lifted AI server shipment guidance by $5B to $20B for FY26.
• Gross margin rate compressed on AI mix (GM 18.3%, −310 bps YoY), but management guided margin improvement in H2 driven by higher storage mix, value engineering, and fading one-time supply chain expedite costs.

What Went Well and What Went Wrong

What Went Well

• Record ISG revenue ($16.80B, +44% YoY) driven by Servers & Networking ($12.94B, +69% YoY); ISG operating income up 14% to $1.47B.
• AI momentum: $8.2B AI server shipments in Q2, $10B shipped in H1; FY26 AI shipment guide raised to $20B with backlog of $11.7B and strong enterprise/sovereign pipeline growth.
• Cash generation and capital returns: CFOA $2.54B in Q2; $1.3B returned via buybacks/dividends; 8M shares repurchased at $114; dividend ~$0.53/share; cash & investments $9.8B.

What Went Wrong

• Gross margin rate fell to 18.3% (from 21.4% YoY) on AI mix; ISG margin rate down to 8.8% (from 11.0%) despite dollar growth.
• Storage revenue declined 3% to $3.86B; large-account demand softness in North America and HCI customers re-evaluating private cloud architectures.
• Traditional servers saw demand weakness in North America; federal spending down; consumer revenue −7% YoY to $1.72B amid promotional environment.

Transcript

Speaker 0

Good afternoon and welcome to the Fiscal Year 2026 Second Quarter Financial Results conference call for Dell Technologies, Inc. I'd like to inform all participants this call is being recorded at the request of Dell Technologies. This broadcast is a copyrighted property of Dell Technologies, Inc. Any rebroadcast of this information in whole or part without the prior written permission of Dell Technologies is prohibited. Following prepared remarks, we will conduct a question and answer session. If you have a question, simply press Star then one on your telephone keypad. At any time during the presentation, I'd like to turn the call over to Paul Frantz, Head of Investor Relations. Mr. Frantz, you may begin. Thanks everyone for joining us. With me today are Jeff Clarke, Yvonne McGill and Tyler Johnson. Our earnings materials are available on our IR website and I encourage you to review these materials.

Also, please take time to review the presentation, which includes additional content to complement our discussion this afternoon. Guidance will be covered on today's call. During this call, unless otherwise indicated, all references to financial measures refer to non-GAAP financial measures, including non-GAAP gross margin, operating expenses, operating income, net income, diluted earnings per share, free cash flow and adjusted free cash flow. A reconciliation of these measures to their most directly comparable GAAP measures can be found in our webdeck and our press release. Growth percentages refer to year over year change unless otherwise specified. Statements made during this call that relate to future results and events are forward-looking statements based on current expectations. Actual results and events could differ materially from those projected due to a number of risks and uncertainties which are discussed in our webdeck and our SEC filings.

We assume no obligation to update our forward-looking statements. Now I'll turn it over to Jeff. Thanks Paul and thanks everyone for joining us. We had a strong operational execution in the second quarter with record AI shipments. Our revenue is a record $29.8 billion, up 19%. ISG and CSG were up 22%. Earnings per share increased by 19% to $2.32, marking a Q2 record. Our modernization work continues to enable internal efficiencies driving decoupling of revenue growth and operational expenses which were down 4% while continuing to invest in R&D. This strong performance resulted in another quarter of robust cash generation and significant capital returns to shareholders. Now let's move to AI, which remains a significant tailwind. We continue to see strong demand for AI servers.

Building on the exceptional demand observed in Q1, we booked $5.6 billion in orders in the second quarter and shipped a record $8.2 billion, resulting in an ending backlog of $11.7 billion. For context, we have shipped more AI servers in the first half of this year than all of last. Our five quarter pipeline continued to grow sequentially with double digit growth across enterprise and sovereign opportunities. Our pipeline remains multiples of our backlog enterprise orders and our buyer base grew sequentially in Q2, distributed across various industries such as financial services, healthcare, and manufacturing. We're seeing strong enterprise interest in our new NVIDIA RTX Pro 6000 AI factory solutions. These turnkey solutions provide the performance, flexibility, and power efficiency enterprises need to manage the entire AI lifecycle at any scale, with air cooled and PCIe options available.

As I mentioned last quarter, our execution in AI continues to be a key differentiator. We are innovating at an unprecedented pace, engineering at scale solutions for customers while remaining agile to rapidly changing customer roadmaps and architectures. We were the first in the world to ship both the NVIDIA GB200 NVL72 solution last year and the GB300 NVL72 in July to CoreWeave, two great examples of our speed to market. In an environment where speed matters, customers are seeing in real time the value in our ability to deploy large scale clusters quickly and reliably. Our execution, value add through engineering, and ability to Dell design and even Dell manufacture components within our at scale data center solutions drive margin rate improvement within AI. In traditional servers, revenue grew again. We now have six consecutive quarters of year over year P&L growth from a demand perspective.

International markets grew, but the April weakness we saw in North America continued. Trust grew double digits as customers prioritized richly configured servers given their focus on density and power efficiency. Driven by a higher mix of our 16th generation servers, we have completed the launch of our 17th generation portfolio of servers designed for ultimate performance, reliability, and security, giving customers the ability to consolidate workloads to make room for AI and to drive broader data center efficiencies. There's still significant opportunity ahead as over 70% of the installed base is running on 14th generation servers or older. In storage, revenue was down 3% and demand moderated. We saw double-digit demand growth in PowerStore, which has grown six consecutive quarters, five of those up double digits, fueled by very strong channel participation. Within PowerStore, 46% of the buyers were new PowerStore customers and 23% were new to Dell storage.

All-flash storage saw strong growth driven by strength in our all-flash offerings across PowerMax, PowerStore, PowerScale, and ObjectScale. Our focus remains on driving not only growth but also expanding profitability in storage. By increasing our mix of Dell IP storage and improving margins within each product in CSG, we saw momentum continue, although not at the pace we expected. Overall, CSG was up 1% and commercial was up 2%. We now have four consecutive quarters of P&L growth, six consecutive quarters of demand growth in commercial. Commercial demand grew double digits in EMEA with continued growth in North America and APJ. To a lower extent, we saw strong demand growth across small and medium business, which helped drive profitability improvement. Consumer revenue declined 7%, but profitability improved as we did a better job on positioning our products. Plus, we were in a deflationary environment.

We expect moderate growth as the PC refresh continues, driven by an aging installed base and the Windows 10 end of life, which is now 48 days away. To fully seize the refresh opportunity, we have taken steps to improve execution and expand our PC TAM. For example, just this morning we launched a new business notebook specifically designed to win the entry-level commercial PC market. This is indicative of the fast strategic actions we're taking to drive growth and gain share while operating within our 5% to 7% long-term profitability targets. In closing, I'll wrap it up by saying we are pleased with our overall performance. We had another strong quarter with record revenue. EPS grew well above our long-term value creation framework. We generated strong cash and shareholder return, and we are building a better company with our modernization work.

Our innovation engine is firing on all cylinders, and the opportunity is showing no signs of slowing down. With the AI hardware and services TAM expected to double from $184 billion last year to $356 billion in 2028, we are doing the work internally to adapt rapidly to evolving customer needs. We really like our hand. Now let me turn it over to Yvonne to talk about Q2 in more detail.

Speaker 1

Thanks Jeff. Let me begin with an overview of our Q2 performance. Then I'll move to ISG, CSG, cash, and guidance. In the second quarter, we saw record revenue and also delivered a Q2 EPS record. Our total revenue went up 19% to $29.8 billion. Our combined ISG and CSG businesses grew 22%. Gross margin was $5.6 billion or 18.7% of revenue. Gross margin rate was driven primarily by a mix shift to AI servers due to record AI shipments. Operating expense was down 4% to $3.3 billion or 11% of revenue as we continue to unlock efficiencies and modernize our processes. Now let's look at operating income. We delivered a 10% increase to $2.3 billion, or 7.7% of revenue. The increase in operating income was driven by higher revenue and lower operating expenses, partially offset by a decline in our gross margin rate.

Q2 net income was up 13% to $1.6 billion, primarily driven by stronger operating income. Our diluted EPS was up 19% to $2.32, a Q2 record. Now let's move to ISG where we delivered another quarter of strong performance. ISG revenue was a record $16.8 billion, up 44%. This marks six consecutive quarters of double-digit revenue growth. Servers and networking revenue was a record $12.9 billion, up 69%. Demand for AI remained strong with $5.6 billion in orders in the second quarter, and we shipped $8.2 billion of AI servers. In traditional servers, we saw continued P&L growth driven by strong TRU expansion as customers consolidated and modernized their data centers. Storage revenue was down 3% to $3.9 billion as demand was softer than anticipated. PowerStore continued its double-digit growth trajectory with six consecutive quarters of growth.

We had ISG operating income of $1.5 billion, up 14%, a Q2 record, and has been up double digits for five consecutive quarters. This was driven primarily by higher revenue. Our ISG operating income rate was down year over year to 8.8% of revenue. As we have outlined before, the mix of our AI business will have an impact on our margin rates. In the second quarter, we saw a significant shift in our mix to AI as the team executed very well and drove record AI shipment. This was the primary driver of our operating income rate this quarter, partially offset by lower operating expenses. Given our engineering differentiation integration, we expect our AI margin rates to improve in the second half. Now let's turn to CSG. CSG revenue was up 1% to $12.5 billion.

Commercial revenue was up 2% to $10.8 billion, while consumer revenue was down 7% to $1.7 billion. CSG operating income was $0.8 billion or 6.4% of revenue. TRUs remained stable sequentially, and we continue to see customers prioritize richly configured AI ready devices. Our mix of small and medium business and transactional increased, driving an improvement in profitability in consumer. Profitability improved due to better execution and a deflationary environment. Now let's move to cash flow and the balance sheet. We had another strong cash quarter with cash flow from operations of $2.5 billion. This was primarily driven by profitability and revenue growth. We ended the quarter with $9.8 billion in cash and investments, up $0.5 billion sequentially. Our core leverage ratio is at our target of 1.5 times.

We returned $1.3 billion of capital to shareholders with 8 million shares of stock repurchased at an average price of $53 and paid a dividend of roughly $0.53 per share. Since our capital return program began at the beginning of fiscal year 2023, we've returned $14.5 billion to shareholders through stock repurchases and dividends. Turning to guidance, we saw strong AI shipments in the first half, delivering $10 billion of AI servers, more than the entirety of last year. We are raising our AI server shipment guidance $5 billion to $20 billion, with shipments slightly weighted to the third quarter. We expect the demand environment we saw in the second quarter for traditional servers and storage to persist into the second half in CSG. As the PC refresh cycle continues, we are focused on improving our execution to grow revenue and gain share.

Overall, we expect profitability to improve in the second half across CSG and ISG, and specifically within AI servers. Given that backdrop, we expect Q3 revenue to be between $26.5 and $27.5 billion, up 11% at the midpoint of $27 billion. ISG and CSG components are expected to grow 13% at the midpoint, with ISG in the low 20% range and CSG up mid single digits. OpEx will be down low single digits. We expect operating income to be up roughly 7%. We expect our diluted share count to be roughly 681 million shares, and our diluted non-GAAP EPS is expected to be $2.45 plus or minus $0.10, up 11% at the midpoint. Moving to the full year, we are raising our full year revenue guidance and now expect fiscal year 2026 revenue to be between $105 billion and $109 billion, with a midpoint of $107 billion, up 12%.

We expect ISG to grow mid-to-high 20% range driven by AI server shipments and continued growth in traditional servers, and we expect storage to be flat for the year. We continue to expect CSG to grow low-to-mid single digits. We expect ISG and CSG combined to grow 14% at the midpoint. The full-year guide reflects improved profitability in the second half for ISG and CSG. We continue to execute our modernization efforts, and we expect operating expense to be down low single digits. We expect operating income to be up roughly 10%. We expect OI to be between $1.4 and $1.5 billion. We are increasing our diluted non-GAAP EPS guidance to $9.55 plus or minus $0.25, up 17% at the midpoint, assuming an annual non-GAAP tax rate of 18%. In closing, we had very strong results with record revenue and a Q2 record for EPS.

We have a broad portfolio with many operational levers that provide the ability and flexibility to hit our commitments. I have four key priorities. First, enable and drive revenue growth and share gains in the business. Second, do the first one profitably. Third, continue our modernization efforts, and lastly, generate significant cash flow and continue our track record of strong capital returns to shareholders. I look forward to seeing many of you at our Security Analyst Meeting on October 7th. There we will discuss our optimism on the growth and value creation opportunities that lie ahead. Now I'll turn it back to Paul to begin Q&A.

Speaker 0

Thanks, Yvonne. Let's get to Q and A. In order to ensure we get to as many of you as possible, please ask one concise question. Let's go to the first question. Thank you. We'll take our first question from Aaron Rakers with Wells Fargo. Yeah, thanks for taking the question. I guess. Jeff, kind of just hitting on the AI discussion out of the gate, you've raised your full year target to $20 billion plus, up from $15 billion last quarter. You've got a Grace Blackwell Ultra product cycle with the GB300 kind of kicking in. I'm curious, given that you did $8.2 billion this last quarter, I guess implying, call it $5 to $6 billion plus or minus throughout the next couple of quarters, what is your ability to kind of flex upward in the capacity to see continued upside to even that $20 billion? Thank you. Sure.

Maybe to bridge from our discussion, 90 days ago we said $15 billion was sounding like a plus of the capital P, L, U, S. I think we delivered upon that in our guide at $20 billion. It's an exciting category. You've heard us talk about the numbers, but I always sit back and like to reflect on so far through the first half of the year, we've sold $17.7 billion of AI infrastructure and we shipped $10 billion of that, which would imply we'll ship about $10 billion in the second half, equal to the $20 billion. The five quarter pipeline continues to grow. Exciting in that pipeline as we saw the sovereign opportunities and the enterprise opportunities grow double digits.

There is complexity here and the complexity lies in these are large scale deployments, many have scheduled deliveries and those scheduled deliveries are dependent on things like buildings being ready, power being installed, cooling being installed, and we're managing a very complex supply chain. A transition, as you called out, to Blackwell Ultra. We're excited about Blackwell Ultra as we are about the rest of our NVIDIA portfolio. The demand continues to be, I think we've said this every quarter, continues to come in lumpy, it's nonlinear, and our guide is the best estimate that we have at this time. I'll tell you, we're not slowing down. We have every intention to convert that very large pipeline into incremental orders we're going to run through. Our goal is to run through the $20 billion and it feels like a plus.

We have more than adequate capacity to take that through our manufacturing network to be able to deliver upon that as we work to convert those orders in time. I hope that helped. Yeah. Thanks, Jeff.

Speaker 1

Thanks.

Speaker 0

The next question will come from Wamsi Mohan with Bank of America. Yes, thank you so much. Nice to see the upward revision and momentum in AI servers. When I look through your third quarter and implied fourth quarter guidelines, it seems like the profit flow through will improve quite significantly as you go into the fourth quarter. I was hoping maybe you can help us think through the components of change as we go from second to third and third to fourth from a profitability standpoint, because it feels like a meaningfully higher step up in the fourth quarter. Thank you so much.

Speaker 1

Sure. Wamsi, why don't I take a run at that CSG for the second half. I'll talk about second half holistically and then we can talk about the fourth quarter. CSG is expected to be slightly higher for the second half versus the first half. We plan to focus on execution, driving revenue and share gains while improving profitability. Continuing that focus, we expect AI servers to be balanced between the first half and the second half. Jeff just alluded that we'll do more if we can, but that's what's implied in our guide. With about $10 billion of revenue with improved margin rates from a storage perspective, storage is expected to perform better sequentially in the second half with more Dell IP as well as normal seasonal acceleration in the fourth quarter.

That acceleration in fourth quarter, that storage weighting is what's driving a significant amount of that expected profitability that's implied in.

Speaker 0

Our fourth quarter guidelines.

Speaker 1

Traditional servers are expected to grow in the second half, and of course we expect our operating expenses to continue to come down as well. Net net, we expect to be able to deliver more profitability in the second half, and you see that again weighted into the fourth quarter.

Speaker 0

Okay, thanks so much, Juan. Thanks, Wamsi. The next question will come from Erik Woodring with Morgan Stanley. Hey guys, thanks so much for taking my question. I just wanted to, Jeff, maybe touch on the storage market. You know, we heard from some of your peers last night about a strengthening data center monetization opportunity. Revenue is down 3% for you guys and you're guiding that business flat now. I think 90 days ago you expected to grow 3% plus for the year. I'd love to just know from the Dell perspective kind of what has changed in the storage market over the last 90 days to get a bit more cautious there. Thanks so much, Erik. You correctly pointed out down 3% P&L growth.

We tried to describe what we saw was in large accounts, demand was a bit slower, particularly month 2 and 3 of the quarter and particularly in the United States, North America. We tend to look at this through the lens of some of the bright spots that we called out in our remarks. PowerStore grew double digits, it's grown now six consecutive quarters, five of them double digits. Our entire all-flash storage portfolio grew double digits. When you look at where we landed in Q2, the guidance for Q3 would suggest we're doing better than normal sequentials, which I think is an improvement. The fact of the matter is our Dell IP storage, we expect to outperform the marketplace. The market is growing and we expect to outgrow that market in the second half.

It's offset by HCI customers going through what I think is a rethink of their private cloud options. You might have noticed yesterday we actually made an announcement around our Dell automation platform to help those HCI customers with an open disaggregated automated alternative. We're working through that headwind of HCI customers that are in the portfolio trying to determine their next path or the path going forward, while at the same time our Dell IP portfolio continues to grow. It outperforms the market. We're expanding margin in each of the categories. We're very optimistic about our Dell IP portfolio and managing through customers' decision and future decision about where they're going with their private cloud deployment. I hope that helps some. Yep, super, super helpful. Thank you, Jeff. You're welcome. Thanks, Erik. We'll take a question from Ben Reitzes with Melius Research.

Speaker 1

Yeah.

Speaker 0

Hey guys, thanks. I wanted to go back to sort of Wamsi's question, but more specifically around AI servers, why will the margins improve and what is the order of magnitude there? I think there's a perception that it's low single digits OP margin and that it could have the potential, you know, eventually over time to get to a higher number than that. What specifically is going on there? How high can it get by the fourth quarter or long term? I know Jeff, you've talked about an attach rate there. Is that the reason that the margins are going up? Thanks. Thanks for the question. I think there are two things to consider and Yvonne hit it. I think it's worth making sure we communicate the business mix matters. When you look at Q2, the AI server component was nearly half of the ISG revenue.

That meant that the traditional server business and the storage business underperformed. What we're trying to call out on our guidance is we're going to see a recovery in North America servers, which are profitable, and we're going to see improved margin performance in our storage business. That changes the ultimate business mix in the second half, which is why Yvonne talked about that as the improvement in AI specifically, which is your question. Q2 is interesting. I would call to your attention that we did add $6.5 billion of revenue quarter over quarter and nearly $500 million of operating income quarter over quarter with that significant shipment that we had in AI. As we said consistently, that's gross dollar accretive, rate dilutive. I think those are examples of that. In our Q2 shipments we shipped a lot of the early Blackwell wins.

As you might mention, I said last quarter those were aggressive deals, very competitive deals, and they were shipped throughout the quarter. Coupled with that, we had some expense that I think is one time in nature in our supply chain as we expedited materials to meet our customer needs and demands and to reconfigure the supply chain with what was going on in our geopolitical environment. We expect those margins to improve through some value engineering, scaling of the business, and the expansion of our enterprise customer base. We had the best quarter we've had in AI with enterprise customers in Q2. Number of customers grew, the largest dollar demand that we had to date in enterprise. I think that bodes well for the future, particularly in enterprise where we have the opportunity to sell networking, storage, and services with AI factories. Okay, thanks Ben. Thanks, Jeff. You bet.

You're in our next. Our next question will come from Vijay Rakesh with Mizuho. Yeah, hi Jeff and Johan, just a quick question on the pipeline. Just wondering what your mix of sovereign orders was. I know you talked about improving AI margins in the back half. Just wondering what would be the improvements there and the margin upside that you expect. Thanks.

Speaker 1

Sure.

Speaker 0

As we look at the pipeline again, I think it's important for us to make sure we communicate clearly. Our sovereign part of the pipeline and our enterprise part of the pipeline grew double digits and grew faster than the CSP portion of the pipeline. That pipeline now has over 6,700 unique customers as opportunity for and the composition of that is predominantly Blackwell, encouraging. We're seeing the new RTX 6000 in that portfolio and we're seeing air and PCIe as a result of that in the pipeline, which are very good indicators of enterprise opportunity. That's the composition of it. It is a composition of CSP from a customer point of view plus enterprise plus sovereign. It's predominantly from a technology point of view Blackwell, with a growing demand of PCIe options.

If I go back to your question about margins, it's what I tried to articulate earlier with Ben. We expect the one-time cost on our supply chain to reconfigure and expedite materials not to be in place in the second half. We think there's some opportunity for us to continue to value engineer the scaling of the P&L and then lastly the enterprise customers and shipping to enterprise customers and the opportunity to attach unstructured storage, networking, and our professional services around that.

Speaker 1

Thank you.

Speaker 0

Thanks, EJ. The next question comes from David Vogt with UBS. Thanks, guys. Thanks, Jeff. Thanks a lot, Jeff. Maybe not to belabor the point, but just for clarification, if we think about the mix in the October quarter to more proprietary Dell storage delivery in server, traditional server, should we expect to see the same level of profitability from those products or should they expand relative to where you were last year, where it was more 3P technology within storage? If that's the case, then should we just think about maybe margins holistically in ISG still being down from last year because of the greater AI server within the ISG segment? Thanks. I'll start and then Yvonne can come in and get specific with the details with the guide.

As we've been moving towards more Dell IP, which is the strategy, those are more margin-rich storage offers than our partner IP. We continue to see our Dell IP portfolio grow, and within that we are actually working to improve and have made progress improving the margins of each one of our Dell IP storage products in our portfolio. As I just mentioned, I think it was Erik's question about growing in storage. We expect our Dell IP storage portfolio to outperform the marketplace. I think that bodes very well for what we're doing in terms of margin and margin growth. The challenge we have is it didn't grow, it was unacceptable. We see that we are working to remedy that.

That's an aggregate storage number, which again, I think is partly explained by the fact that we have HCI customers working through their next decisions and next purchases in infrastructure, which is why, again, I'll come back and link to it. It's very important as we look at a disaggregated architecture that's open and now with automation capability that we've just provided customers, we're providing an alternative. I think that's a key element going forward.

Speaker 1

I'd add to that, our gross margin rate is certainly a function, and Jeff mentioned it, of our mix. We called up the AI portion to $20 billion, and we've seen we've lowered our expectations for the core business for CSG, for traditional servers and storage embedded within our second half guide. The impact of the input costs that Jeff's talking about will also have some offset in gross margin, but there's rate potential compression for the second half. We're still guiding strong EPS growth of 17%. I feel we're going to navigate through the environment and deliver successfully.

Speaker 0

Maybe to put another level of inspection, here is the AI revenue was three times the mix of the business than it was in the previous quarter, Q1 to Q2. As we said, that has a dilutive effect. In our guide, you're going to see the % of our AI business be less, which means the traditional server and Dell IP storage part of the business will be a greater %, which is more profitable, leading to the more profitable second half.

Speaker 1

Right. The seasonality of storage in the fourth quarter.

Speaker 0

Very excited about that. Thanks, David. Thank you guys. Moving on to Amit Daryanani with Evercore. Good afternoon, everyone. I guess I just have a question on the fiscal year 2026 guide. The way you folks have raised it, you're raising the top line by 4 points, the bottom line by about $0.15. It's what it looks like. $4 billion more of revenues and about $100 million, $110 million more of net income. I'm sure there's a lot of moving parts over here. It almost looks like AI server margins are in the 2%, 2.5% zone for you folks. Maybe just talk about why is the conversion margin so low for the incremental revenues that are coming into the model and what are the other puts and takes around it? Assuming AI margins are better than that 2%, 2.5% math would imply. Thank you.

Speaker 1

If I think about the guide that we have for the second half, certainly the demand dynamics play a key role in that. If I think about the traditional server, when I think about the AI mix, the biggest impact to the second half and the profitability and outcome is the seasonality within the ISG business and within storage. When through how we're going to drive more profitability, I really do think it's holistic across the board. It is weighted towards the standard seasonality in the fourth quarter from a storage standpoint. That's what is embedded within guide. That's what you can see, that's what we deliver historically and we will do that again this fiscal year.

Speaker 0

Thanks, Amit. The next question will come from Michael Ng with Goldman Sachs. Hey, good afternoon. Thanks for the question. Just within ISG, I was wondering if you could talk a little bit more about some of the key things that may have impacted the traditional server and storage performance in the quarter. I was wondering if any changes in federal demand played an impact and then, you know, sequentially, were there any notable margin changes that you would call out for traditional servers and storage. Thank you, Mike. Let me try to give some color to that. The slowness that we saw in North America in traditional servers in April that we commented on in Q1 continued into Q2 too, and our North America's traditional server demand was challenged through the quarter.

We had demand growth in all other regions, but in North America, our most profitable region was challenged from a demand perspective. We saw that again continue from what we encountered in April. Federal spending continues to be down. That had an impact on our overall demand for the quarter. We continue to work on the opportunity of server consolidation that exists out there today. We saw a continued uplift in more cores, more memory, more SSDs, so the content of our servers is going up. ASPs continue to trend up. We do see this notion of server consolidation happening in the marketplace, replacing old servers with more efficient new servers. For example, our 17G converts old servers at 6 to 1 to 7 to 1 ratios, depending on which variety we're looking at. We think the opportunity is still massive out there.

70% of our installed base is still running 14G or older servers, and we expect our traditional server business to grow in the second half, albeit a little bit muted from our expectations at the beginning of the year. In storage, it was what I tried to describe earlier as the large accounts, particularly in North America, particularly in months two and three, was slower than expected. Our Dell IP portfolio continues to shine around our PowerStore. We're winning new customers. The mix of new customers and old customers or existing customers continues to bias towards new customers coming to the portfolio, which is encouraging.

Our all-flash portfolio continues to grow significantly in double digits, and again we have this, if you want to call it a headwind, it's just the reality of what we've been selling for years as it comes up for refresh where again our Dell IP portfolio, I expect it to outperform the market. We have customers in our HCI business that are being thoughtful about their next purchase decisions and how they want to build their private cloud. Our offering there is a more open, disaggregated architecture. Our entire Dell IP storage portfolio was that, and now bundled with an automation platform that makes it easy to scale and deploy infrastructure systems and solutions. Thank you, Jeff. Of course. We'll take a question from Simon Leopold with Raymond James. Thanks for taking the question, Jeff. Earlier in the call you alluded to progress and encouragement around enterprise.

I'd like to see if you could double click on that vertical and offer us some quantification. Related to this, NVIDIA last night talked about improvement, sequential improvement in Hopper business for them. I'm just wondering whether that is related to enterprise traction or if you see that as something different. Thank you. Yes, demand within the quarter for enterprise AI was up significantly. It was a very measurable part of our mix. It's the single largest number of customers that we sold to in a quarter. It is the most revenue we generated to enterprise customers in a quarter to date. We now have eight consecutive quarters of quarter-over-quarter growth of the buyer base. The mix now is roughly 50% new customers and 50% returning customers. We're seeing that across a broad base of segments, whether it's tech firms, manufacturing firms, financial services firms, engineering firms, higher education, healthcare.

The number of PoCs are up, the number of PoCs converting to production is up. We think these are great opportunities to build Dell AI factories for enterprise, which ultimately gives us an opportunity to sell the networking, storage, and professional services around that. We're very encouraged about the momentum. Customers are getting real value-added AI or they have deployed it into real difficult problems. There is a return on those investments, and we see that dollars continuing to go. I would look at our own company as an example of getting return on investment with investing in AI infrastructure. Does that help? It does. Any thoughts on why NVIDIA saw sequential growth in the Hopper business for them? Did you see that? Recall many enterprises are not ready for DLC, don't have the increased power density that some of the advanced technologies have.

With Hopper air going into current data centers, the RTX 6000 as I mentioned as an example, we saw significant growth in that. Those are all indicators that enterprises are buying AI and deploying AI in their current infrastructure, which is very encouraging. Great, thank you. You're welcome. We'll go to Samik Chatterjee with JPMorgan. Yeah, hi, thanks for taking my question, Jeff. Maybe sticking with AI servers. I was curious if you can share how the backlog or the pipeline there has transitioned to GB300. What you're seeing from customers in terms of their mix of demand shifting to GB300 versus the GB200 and is that leading to some level of margin or pricing pressure on the older platforms in terms of just demand profile there? Thank you. Our backlog is at $11.7 billion, is rich with all forms of Blackwell.

Customers that started early deployment of the GB200 continue with those deployments. Customers are migrating to GB300 without getting into the specific details of how much of each one of them. The backlog is primarily Blackwell, the pipeline is primarily Blackwell. All variants of Blackwell, B200, B300, GB200, GB300. It depends on customer specific needs, how they're deploying, that the parts are in full production and have wide scale availability. We're shipping all variants to customers. We're excited about the technology. The transition continues to go well. Our partnership with NVIDIA and our customers to get the racks ready or the nodes ready themselves I think is working incredibly well, which is enabling us to move the material through the factories very quickly. The cycle time is very quick, very good if you will. Deployment to our customers is second to none.

The fact that it shows up, you can turn it on and it works and it's deployed at scale we believe is a differentiator in the marketplace for us. Thank you. Of course. Our next question comes from Asiya Merchant with Citi.

Speaker 1

Great, thanks for squeezing me in here. On the PC side, if I may, I think some of your peers have talked about better second half growth. I think you alluded to share gains and improving profitability here in the back half. Just help us understand what gives you the confidence in that as we kind of look to the back half. At a high level, if people are thinking about 2026, should we expect PC momentum to sustain here or was there a lot of pull forward and refresh activity that happened in 2025 that would suppress growth in 2026.

Speaker 0

Thank you. Maybe in reverse order, you have the Windows 10 end of life. That is an event that is certainly an opportunity to refresh. The market continues to be large in that area. There's still many hundreds of millions of PCs that can't run Windows 11. There's an opportunity for Windows 10 PCs that can run Windows 11 to continue to be upgraded. Our best marker is about half of the installed base is now upgraded, which tells you about half of the installed base is not. That's what's in front of us. We're 48 days away from the end of life period of Microsoft. Highly unlikely the other half is going to be done in the next 48 days. We have the opportunity to push through that. That likely spills into next year. How much I don't know.

It's why we believe the second half of the market continues, the good PC market. We have every intention to grow. We have every intention to outperform the marketplace and take share. That's our goal. We have not done that consistently enough. That's problematic. We are focused on doing so. I think we've leaned into the market as we need to while understanding our operating range of 5 to 7% operating margins. The new product that we launched this morning I think is indicative that we're playing to win and leaning in to do so. The organization is focused on that. This business is hugely important to our company. In many ways, it's a scale business. It is part of our end-to-end solution for our commercial customers, from small businesses to the largest businesses in the world. It's a primary customer acquisition vehicle for us.

Many customers experience our company through the PC business. They experience our brands, they experience their interaction with our company through our PC business. That's why it's very important we're focused on it. I'm not happy with the share performance. We're going to turn that around, and we've reflected that in our guide where we believe our business will grow mid single digits and will improve our operating margins. Thank you. Yes. Our next question will come from Mehdi Hosseini with SIG. Yes, thanks for taking my question. Just two quick follow-ups. In order to get to 7% year over year growth in operating profit and given your OpEx guide, gross margin would need to improve. Corporate gross margin would need to improve by about 150, 160 basis points. I'm just trying to understand if that's the case, what are the key drivers behind the gross margin improvement.

I have a follow-up. Sure.

Speaker 1

As I look at the second half and have talked about it a bit, we have a different seasonality in the second half with a solid weighting of storage and lean in on storage in the ISG business in the fourth quarter. As we look through that and from a profitability standpoint for the second half, I see CSG is expected to do slightly better second half versus first half. For all the reasons we've already talked about, I expect AI servers to be balanced. Again, we're improving that margin rate as we've talked about. The storage mix, storage is one of the biggest drivers and Jeff's talked about it already. Not only the seasonality within storage, but the mix more towards our Dell IP drives more profitability for us, which we'll continue to benefit from. Traditional servers we're thinking will grow in the second half.

We're working on other areas we've called up. Obviously, we've called up The Guide to $107 billion at the midpoint and called up profitability. If I think through a lot of the driver of that because we called up $5 billion in AI servers, a lot of the driver there is holistic profitability across the company, across all pieces of the portfolio or I wouldn't have been able to call up the operating income in addition to the margin. We're focused on profitable growth and driving efficiency through the business.

Speaker 0

I see. Thank you. And a quick follow-up for Jeff. This may have come up in a prior call, but I'm just looking at your revenue mix. Product versus services, and services has remained around 20-25% of the total revenue, but with a significantly higher gross margin. Why not try to scale services as a way to expedite improvement in profitability? We are trying to do that versus selling more PC, selling more servers, selling more storage, selling more AI. We look at the opportunity to attach all forms of services, whether that's ProSupport, ProSupport Plus, our professional services, our installation services, our deployment services, driven by outperforming the market and growing. Growing is the best way to improve our contribution of services in our portfolio. Thanks, Krish. Our next question will come from Krish Sankar with TD Cowen. Yeah, hi, thanks for taking my question.

I kind of had a two-part question too. One is for Jeff. Can you talk a little bit about the AI server mix? How much is liquid cooled versus air cooled? How much is on base CTO architecture and how do you expect that to evolve over the next year and any implications to margins? Along the same follow-up for Yvonne, congrats on raising the numbers, but it looks like your revenue raise is about 4% compared to prior guide for full year and EPS is only one and a half. Why isn't the full year EPS higher? Thank you. The backlog and looking at the five-quarter pipeline would be biased towards direct liquid cooling, and our large-scale deployments of the GB200 and GB300 is the quick and accurate answer of what our backlog looks like. It's a mix of both technology as well as what is liquid cooled.

Speaker 1

To your question, from an overall standpoint we've got additional $5 billion in AI with EPS contributions that goes with it of course and about $1 billion out of CSG traditional server storage that I've mentioned. We will be driving that growth that we've outlined with the profitability that we've outlined based on numerous drivers there, of which mix and efficiency are leading the left.

Speaker 0

We'll go one more question, please. We'll now take our final question from Steven Fox with Fox Advisors. Thanks just for my one question. I was hoping Jeff, if you could look forward on your supply chain both incoming and outgoing. You mentioned some expedites, deflationary pressures, moving capacity around. How do those dynamics play out differently or the same in the rest of the fiscal year? Thanks. Let me talk about the overall supply chain and then maybe specifically about AI. When I look at what's in front of us, we had a deflationary Q2 of all input costs. I expect that to flatten over to the second half, so you're in both Q3 and Q4. We believe we have managed through the complexities of tariffs quite well and have not impacted our customers. We did not raise price.

I think the agility and resilience of our supply chain continues to pay the dividends and following the jurisdictions and rules that we have to when it comes to the political environment today. When I look at AI specifically, I tried to mention, perhaps I wasn't clear, that the cost that we incurred in Q2 to expedite material for our GB200 deployments and shipments and then the reconfiguring our supply chain to optimize that was a one-time cost in Q2 that I don't expect to incur in Q3 and in Q4. Thanks, Steve. Great, thanks. Thank you. Steph, over to you to close this out. Sure. Just wanted to thank everybody for joining us today. A few points as we wrap up. AI continues to accelerate and our differentiated offering is resonating with our customers with $17.7 billion in AI orders in the first half of the year.

We are delivering and innovating for the largest at-scale AI clusters in the world while scaling it into AI factor for enterprises. We saw very strong revenue and EPS growth, both up 19%. We raised our full year revenue and EPS guidance, driving a second half that drives growth and improved profitability. Our focus continues to be on generating significant cash flow that enables meaningful shareholder return. I look forward to seeing many of you at our security analyst meeting on October 7th. Thanks for your time today. Thank you. This concludes today's conference call. We appreciate your participation. You may now disconnect at this time.