Dell Technologies Q2 FY2027 Earnings Call - Record Revenue and EPS Driven by AI and Traditional Server Modernization

Operator, Conference Call Moderator, Dell Technologies: Good afternoon, and welcome to the fiscal year 2027 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 the 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 any time during the presentation. I’d like to turn the call over to Paul Franz, head of Investor Relations. Mr. Franz, you may begin.

Paul Franz, Head of Investor Relations, Dell Technologies: Thanks everyone for joining us. With me today are Jeff Clarke, David Kennedy, and Tyler Johnson. Our earnings materials are available on our IR website, and I encourage you to review these materials. Also, please take some time to review the presentation, which includes additional content to complement our discussion this afternoon. 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 web deck 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 web deck and our SEC filings. We assume no obligation to update our forward-looking statements. Now, I’ll turn it over to Jeff.

Jeff Clarke, Chief Executive Officer, Dell Technologies: Thanks, Paul, and thanks everyone for joining us. Another outstanding quarter. I am proud of how our team executed across the business, delivering record revenue and record earnings per share. Revenue was $47 billion, up 58%, and earnings per share was $7.04, up 203%. These results reflect the compounding benefits of our competitive advantages, the breadth of our portfolio, and the strength of our operating model. Our modernization efforts are driving greater efficiency and significant operating leverage, enabling us to grow earnings faster than revenue. Customers no longer see IT environments simply as cost centers, but as value drivers that enable growth, productivity, and competitive advantage. As a result, they are expanding and reallocating budgets to support continued investment. This is creating opportunities across our portfolio from infrastructure to client devices.

Our world-class supply chain and ability to serve customers across their IT environment are helping us meet more of their needs and gain share. Our deployment and service capabilities are helping customers integrate solutions across their IT environments and capture more value quickly. The proof is in our results. Over the past 12 months, we have booked more than $130 billion in AI server orders. In just the past two quarters, we have generated almost as much revenue from traditional servers and networking as we have in any prior full year in company history. Storage returned to growth and share gain, with strong demand for Dell IP storage products, and CSG revenue is growing at the fastest rate in five years. It is clear why demand for our solutions is exceeding available supply.

Our results and guidance demonstrate the strength of our position as customers enter a new era of infrastructure modernization. Customers are modernizing their data centers for both AI and non-AI workloads, and the benefits are meaningful. AI is an important catalyst, but the opportunity extends well beyond AI-optimized infrastructure. AI requires modern, disaggregated architectures that keep data accessible and in motion across compute, storage, and networking. It is also accelerating investment across traditional IT environments as customers see greater performance, efficiency, and resiliency. Our AI server momentum continues to accelerate. We booked $60.9 billion of AI orders in this quarter, the most in our history. We are also seeing AI-related tailwinds in traditional servers and networking, along with early signs of increased storage demand as customers prepare, manage, and protect growing volumes of data. Deployment methods are evolving as well.

On-prem and edge infrastructure offers attractive token economics for the right workloads while giving customers greater control over their data and intellectual property. Our portfolio, global reach, and deep customer relationships position us to help customers design, deploy the right solutions for their performance, cost, and security requirements. Together, these trends are expanding our addressable market and driving demand across compute, networking, storage, and PCs. This represents a significant long-term opportunity for us. It plays directly to our strengths and expands the value we can deliver across the entire IT environment. Now, on to the results. Starting with ISG, revenue increased 89% to a record $31.8 billion, with operating income of $4.8 billion and an operating income rate of 15%. In AI, demand continues to accelerate. In Q2, we booked a record of $60.9 billion in AI orders and recognized $16.4 billion in AI server revenue.

We exited the quarter with a record $95 billion of AI backlog, and our pipeline continued to grow sequentially and remains multiples of our backlog, even after converting $131.7 billion into orders over the past 12 months. Demand is broadening across Neoclouds, sovereigns, and enterprise customers, and our customer count has surpassed 6,500. The scale and complexity of these deployments reinforce why customers choose us. AI infrastructure requires much more than assembling and delivering components. These opportunities demand significant engineering, design, and deployment expertise, with some engagements requiring upwards of 50 unique designs as customers optimize for workload performance, power, cooling, and the data center environment. This complexity plays to our strength. Our engineering capabilities, broad portfolio, global supply chain, and ability to deploy and support infrastructure at scale globally differentiate us, enable customers to move from design to production more quickly.

We demonstrated those capabilities again by becoming the first to ship rack systems engineered on the NVIDIA Vera Rubin platform. The AI market is evolving rapidly, and we are focused on expanding our platforms and capabilities, solving increasingly complex customer challenges, and innovating across the infrastructure stack. With accelerating demand and a growing pipeline in differentiated capabilities, we are well-positioned to capture the opportunity ahead. Moving to traditional servers, revenue was up 122% as demand remains exceptionally strong, supported by multiple vectors of growth. First, a majority of our growth is coming from existing customers as they continue to refresh and modernize their data centers to support traditional workloads. Heightened security and resiliency requirements are also creating incremental demand as customers modernize their infrastructure. Second, we are seeing a growing trend of customers that require meaningful CPU compute capacity to support AI and agentic workflows.

These workloads are creating incremental demand for traditional servers. We are executing very well against both opportunities and gaining share. Over the past two quarters, we have gained more than 10 points of traditional server share, and we expect to gain share again this quarter. With the majority of the install base still on 14G or older servers, we see a significant and durable refresh opportunity ahead. The strength and breadth of demand, combined with our continued share gains, demonstrate the competitiveness of our portfolio and the consistency of our execution. Turning to storage, revenue was up 26% as strong demand for our Dell IP portfolio translated into revenue growth and improved storage profitability. Dell IP delivered another record demand growth quarter, making this our sixth consecutive quarter of demand growth above market. Demand remains broad-based.

Enterprises continue to modernize their storage environments as data growth increases the importance of keeping data available and secure. At the same time, we are beginning to see incremental demand from AI workloads, which require customers to prepare, manage, and move increasingly large volumes of data. We saw strong growth across PowerFlex, PowerStore, PowerProtect, and PowerVault, with PowerStore posting double-digit demand growth for the ninth consecutive quarter. PowerScale and ObjectScale also drove another exceptional quarter in unstructured storage, which has now grown at double digit or better for three consecutive quarters. Storage is becoming a more meaningful contributor to our growth and profitability. Dell IP continues to increase as a percentage of our storage mix, and margins continue to improve, supporting overall ISG profitability. Our share gains, expanding Dell IP mix, and accelerating pace of product development give us confidence in the opportunity ahead.

Turning to CSG, revenue grew 20% with demand growth across all regions and verticals. Commercial revenue grew 22%, our eighth consecutive quarter of growth, with demand up for the 10th quarter. Large enterprise customers continue to refresh their PC install base, driving double-digit growth across all regions. More cost-sensitive customers are extending their upgrade cycles. This is increasing the number of older devices in the install base and extending the long-term refresh opportunity for CSG. Consumer revenue was up 7%, the fourth consecutive quarter of demand growth. CSG profitability remained strong, benefiting from price discipline and greater scale. In closing, we delivered record revenue and EPS with continued strong cash flow and record capital returned to shareholders. Our results reflects several reinforcing factors. First, infrastructure demand is growing structurally, driven by data center modernization, AI adoption, and attractive economics of deploying workloads on-prem.

Second, our broad-based portfolio across AI infrastructure, traditional servers and networking, storage and PCs enable us to serve the full range of our customers’ needs. Lastly, we delivered value at scale through our engineering and deployment expertise, supply chain scale, and fast discipline operating model. Our full-year operating expense rate guidance of approximately 8% of revenue is the lowest in our company’s 42-year history, demonstrates the operating leverage this model can deliver. These advantages reinforce one another. They are driving growth, share gains, profitability, and cash generation. By creating more value for our customers, we compound our advantages and create durable cash flow and long-term value for our shareholders. I am proud of our team’s performance. We enter the second half with strong momentum and confidence in our position. With that, let me turn it over to David to walk through the financials and our outlook.

David Kennedy, Chief Financial Officer, Dell Technologies: Thanks, Jeff. We delivered another record quarter, capping a very strong first half of the year. The team executed exceptionally well, driving record revenue, record EPS, and record shareholder returns. Total revenue was up 58% to $47 billion. Gross margin dollars grew 78% to $9.9 billion. Gross margin rate was 21.1%, driven by an improvement in ISG margin rate and a higher mix of ISG revenue. Operating expenses were up 22% to $4 billion, primarily from variable compensation tied to our outperformance. Building on last quarter, we continued to drive significant scale in the P&L, with OpEx down 250 basis points to 8.5% of revenue. Operating income grew 160% to $5.9 billion or 12.6% of revenue, driven by higher revenue, scale, and price discipline across servers, storage, and CSG. Net income was up 189% to $4.6 billion, primarily driven by strong operating income.

Diluted EPS increased 203% to $7.04, a record. Moving to ISG. ISG delivered record revenue of $31.8 billion, up 89%, marking the 10th consecutive quarter of double-digit or better revenue growth. AI server momentum accelerated, and we set records across the board, including $60.9 billion in orders, $16.4 billion in revenue, and $95 billion in ending backlog. Traditional server and networking revenue was $10.5 billion, up 122%, as demand continued to outpace supply. Storage revenue was $4.9 billion, up 26%, with strong demand across the Dell IT portfolio, driving revenue growth and significant margin contribution. Dell IT storage demand has grown above market for six consecutive quarters. Unstructured storage remained one of our fastest-growing solutions, with broader strength across the rest of the portfolio.

ISG operating income was a record $4.8 billion, up 225%, marking the ninth consecutive quarter of double-digit or better growth, primarily driven by higher revenue across the business. Operating margin was 15%, up 620 basis points. Looking at the key drivers of margin performance, a number of factors came together and went our way this quarter. The demand environment was strong, mix and rates were favorable, and the team executed with discipline. While we would not expect every benefit to continue at this level, the quarter also reflects meaningful structural improvements in the business, which is reflected in our second half guidance. Looking more closely at the drivers, first, we are realizing the benefits of our multi-year modernization journey. That work is driving greater efficiency and strong operating leverage, resulting in significant scale.

Second, storage profitability was up with a higher mix of Dell IT and rate expansion across the solutions. Third, we maintained strong operational price discipline in a dynamic environment, reflecting our team’s strong execution and continued focus on supporting our customers. Turning to CSG. CSG revenue was up 20% to $15 billion. Commercial revenue grew for the eighth consecutive quarter, up 22% to $13.2 billion, and consumer revenue increased 7% to $1.8 billion. CSG operating income was $1.1 billion, or 7.6% of revenue, driven by pricing discipline and the benefits of scale in the P&L. We will continue to balance customer demand with availability of supply to drive profitable share gain. CSG remains an integral part of the business. It provides scale across our supply chain and manufacturing, completes our end-to-end portfolio with the essential productivity device, and is our most capitally efficient business.

Together, these strengths make CSG a significant source of cash generation and help fund growth across Dell and capital returns to our shareholders. Moving to cash and the balance sheet. We delivered another strong cash quarter with cash flow from operations of $2.2 billion and adjusted free cash flow of $8.1 billion. This was primarily driven by sequential revenue growth and higher profitability. We returned an all-time record, $4.3 billion to shareholders this quarter, including repurchasing 9.5 million shares at an average price of $401 per share and paying a dividend of approximately $0.63 per share. This acceleration in shareholder return, up $2.2 billion quarter-on-quarter, reflects our agility and commitment to capital deployment as we generate more significant adjusted free cash flow, as well as our confidence in our long-term value creation.

We ended the quarter with $14.2 billion in cash and investments, up $0.2 billion sequentially, and our core leverage ratio is at 0.8x. Overall, our strong cash generation and healthy balance sheet further validated by positive credit rating actions during the quarter provide significant flexibility to invest in the business and continue returning capital to shareholders. Turning to guidance. We’ve had a strong first half of the year, and we expect the second half to be stronger. The momentum we’ve seen continues, and we are raising our expectations across every line of business. Our second half gross margin rate outlook has improved over the past 90 days, and we continue to drive significant operating leverage and scale. For Q3, we expect revenue to be $49 billion at the midpoint, up roughly 80% year-on-year.

We expect ISG to grow roughly 145%, supported by $19 billion in AI server revenue. CSG revenue is expected to be up roughly 15%. Operating expenses are expected to be down low single digits sequentially. Operating income is expected to grow roughly 120%. We expect ISG operating income rate to be up just over a point year-over-year, even as AI server revenue more than triples year-over-year. We expect CSG operating income rate to moderate to roughly 6% as we balance demand, share, and profitability. We anticipate a diluted share count of approximately 651 million shares. Diluted non-GAAP earnings per share is expected to be $6.50, up over 150% at the midpoint. For the full year, we are raising our revenue guide by $25 billion to $192 billion at the midpoint, up roughly 70%, with diluted non-GAAP EPS of $25.50, up approximately 150%.

We expect ISG to grow roughly 120%, driven by AI server revenue up 3x year-over-year to $74 billion. We expect traditional servers to grow just over 100%, storage up in the mid-teens, and CSG revenue to grow in the mid-teens. Excluding the mix impact of AI servers, gross margin rates are up year-over-year. Our modernization efforts are paying off, simplifying, standardizing, automating, and enhancing our operating model with AI, delivering significant operating leverage with operating expenses to be approximately 8% of revenue, the lowest level in the company’s 42-year history. With gross margin improvement and the benefits of significant scale, operating income is expected to grow approximately 120%, with over two points of rate improvement year-over-year. I&O is expected to be between $1.4 billion and $1.5 billion. Diluted non-GAAP earnings per share is expected to be $25.50, up approximately 150% at the midpoint.

In closing, we’ve delivered another exceptional quarter, capping a record first half of the year. Over the past two quarters, revenue was $90.8 billion, up 71%. EPS grew 208% to $11.90. We generated record cash flow from operations of $6.3 billion and returned an all-time record $6.3 billion to shareholders. The team executed exceptionally well across the business. The second quarter provided further evidence that AI momentum is accelerating, with $60.9 billion in orders, $16.4 billion in revenue, and a backlog approaching $100 billion. At the same time, traditional servers, storage, and CSG all contributed, reinforcing the breadth and balance of our portfolio. Beyond the numbers, I would highlight the operating discipline. The modernization work we’ve invested in over several years is showing up in scale, in margin structure, and in our ability to execute in a dynamic supply environment.

We’re entering the second half from a position of strength and will continue to balance growth with discipline to drive long-term shareholder value. We are seeing the compounding benefits of our durable competitive advantages, differentiated operating model, and operational discipline. We’re excited about the second half and confident in our long-term value creation. Thank you to the team for their execution, and thank you all for your time today. Now I’ll turn it back to Paul to begin Q&A.

Paul Franz, Head of Investor Relations, Dell Technologies: Thanks, David, and let’s get to Q&A. In order to ensure we get to as many of you as possible, please ask one concise question. Let’s go with the first question.

Operator, Conference Call Moderator, Dell Technologies: Thank you. Our first question comes from Amit Daryanani with Evercore.

Amit Daryanani, Analyst, Evercore: Yep. Thanks a lot. Good afternoon, everyone, and congrats on a really nice print here. I want to spend some time on the non-AI part of ISG. If I look at traditional server growth of 122%, it was actually faster than AI compute, and storage grew 26% as well. I think a worry folks will have is this driven by a combination of pricing and pre-buys rather than real demand? I do not know if you can spend some time just talking about what do you think is driving this demand, and if there is a way to think about pricing versus demand versus share gains and really any color on what workloads or use cases are you seeing this infrastructure going into and the durability effect would be helpful. Thank you.

David Kennedy, Chief Financial Officer, Dell Technologies: Sure, Amit. Let me try a little bit. If you look at traditional servers and what we are seeing, which is the vast majority of the growth that we saw in the quarter, it is a consistent theme that I think we talked about last quarter. One, there is a modernization in the data center.

Jeff Clarke, Chief Executive Officer, Dell Technologies: That modernization continues to drive consolidation. It is increasing space, driving power efficiency and cooling, and it is obviously driving demand. Demand for new servers that have more cores, new servers that have more DRAM, and new servers that have more storage in them as we consolidate an aged install base. Secondly, that is probably the next big opportunity for us. As much as we have modernized, and to give you a sense that it is not an end near or it is a one-time thing, we still have 1.2 million assets that are 14G or older in the install base. They have to be upgraded.

They’re going to have to be consolidated with new technology, whether it’s our 17G and the consolidation ratios are 6 to 8 to 1, or our new 18G that will begin shipping next month, where we see consolidation rates in the 12 to 14 servers per new 18G server. That is going to happen, and a forcing function is going to be the security environment that we live in today. We think about what’s happening in the world of security and driving increased resilience and new requirements like post-quantum cryptography coming online, old infrastructure has to be updated. Then increasingly, we’re seeing enterprises drive AI workloads, specifically agentic workloads. I know your question was specifically the non-ones, but it’s complemented by growth there. In storage, we see a very similar dynamic. We have the dynamic of our products are very competitive in the marketplace. Data continues to grow.

Regardless of the inflationary environment that exists, more data is being created on the planet at the edge and data centers in the cloud, and that data has to be stored, it has to be encrypted and protected, and those are the opportunities that we see, which is why we believe our Dell IP portfolio has a pretty significant tailwind. Think about it. I think if we blend Q1 and Q2 together, we grew storage 17% in the first half of the year. We continue to see our Dell IP storage growing ahead of the market for six consecutive quarters on a demand basis. We could run off a bunch of fun numbers. PowerStore has now grown 10 consecutive quarters in a row. We got PowerScale five quarters in a row, ObjectScale four quarters in a row, Data Domain three quarters in a row.

Our All-Flash Array have grown now 10 quarters in a row. So there is inherent demand. Our products are more competitive, and we’re seeing that play out in the marketplace from the largest enterprise customers down to small and medium-sized businesses. Then there’s also the opportunity to grow with AI, which is driven by agents and KV cache and new techniques in the AI world. I hope that helps.

David Kennedy, Chief Financial Officer, Dell Technologies: To add, Jeff, I think it’s part of the durability of that growth and demand. Again, we see as part of our guide, our second half growth rates maintaining what you’ve seen in the first half. Jeff mentioned the 70% growth in storage, pretty similar mid-teens for the second half. We’ll continue to guide to traditional server growing triple digits again for the second half as we drive that through. We continue to see pipelines build. We continue to see the use cases that Jeff mentioned. It all points to a more broad-based, more durable ecosystem.

Jeff Clarke, Chief Executive Officer, Dell Technologies: Thanks, Colin.

Operator, Conference Call Moderator, Dell Technologies: The next question will come from Ben Reitzes with Melius Research.

Ben Reitzes, Analyst, Melius Research: Hey, guys. Thanks, I will echo pretty impressive quarter and guide there. Wanted to ask about a little longer term. Your partner in AI servers talked about growing 70% next year in overall revenue. You guys are growing faster than that. Your backlog just surged. You also have these CPU racks that are new, adding to traditional servers. Should you grow kind of in line with NVIDIA for next year? You guys are really part of the APIE segment they have. Do you see that kind of growth rate in your future? Anything you want to say about your long-term growth rate, given it is so much better than expected, would be appreciated. Thanks.

David Kennedy, Chief Financial Officer, Dell Technologies: Thanks, Ben. Look, I think if you anchor in on our second half trajectory, building on the last question, you can see we like the position in relation to the durability that we see in the demand. We see it across the portfolio, and that is giving us tremendous leverage. As we continue to grow that scale that we get in the P&L, again, offers us the opportunity to continue to find scale and growth in the business. The second half growth, which is 68%, is pretty much a mirror image to the first half, 71%. It is obvious we are seeing signs where the data center is turning in from this cost center approach to a value creator. The ecosystem of the enterprise customers that we are seeing are starting to embrace that.

There’s lots of complexity in execution. I think right now, really keen to execute a strong second half, continue that great momentum as we go through the second half of the year. I think we’ll be in a great position at that point, and we’ll continue to look for the growth going forward.

Jeff Clarke, Chief Executive Officer, Dell Technologies: Ben, maybe some more context around that. Our five-quarter pipeline grew sequentially. That’s after booking $131.7 billion of orders over the past four quarters. I think that gives you a sense of what’s happening today. If I look at the longer-term trends, I know you’re a believer of this, but as we see it, agentic demand is reshaping the data center and the underlying infrastructure. Inference is past training and is pure demand on our industry. We think the tokens that inference drives is going to grow 87 times to 3,600 quadrillion tokens by 2030. Training demand grows 5x to 850 zettaflops by 2030. Enterprise agentic is expected to be the single largest workload by 2028.

We’re expecting AI to be 75% of all data center demand by 2030, adding 200 gigawatts of power over that same timeframe, and half of that, we believe, is right in our sweet spot with our customers, the Neocloud sovereigns and enterprises. If you look at that math, we think the opportunity in front of us is more than a trillion dollars over that timeframe. We believe we’re well-positioned. We believe that our model is differentiated, that our engineering is differentiating ourselves with every customer that we interact with. The scale of our deployment capabilities is unmatched globally. We believe what we’re doing on the support side is equally important, helping customers ramp getting to that first token faster than anyone else, and then keeping it running.

The DFS component that we have to help customers in that bridge point from an order to that first token is something that we believe is differentiating us, and we’re going to continue to focus on that. If you believe that demand is there, it drives more servers in the agentic workload, and it drives more data around that agentic workload, growing each of those areas for us as well.

Thanks, Ed.

Operator, Conference Call Moderator, Dell Technologies: Our next question will come from Mark Newman with Bernstein.

Mark Newman, Analyst, Bernstein: Mark, thanks so much. Congrats again on the fantastic numbers. Probably a few more details on the huge strength you are seeing in both traditional and AI servers. First of all, for traditional servers, this has been traditionally almost all enterprise customers. I believe you are lumping in the CPU racks, the agentic AI servers that are CPU racks in there, I believe. Is this traditional server category still almost all enterprise, or are you seeing a portion of that from, say, Neoclouds or CSPs? Then similarly for the AI server customer mix, both revenue and orders. I know majority in the past has been Neoclouds or tier 2 CSPs. Is that still the same? I wondered if you could give us any hints in terms of the relative growth rate between enterprise versus other larger customers in the AI server mix.

Because previously you said enterprise had been growing faster, I just wondered if that is still the case given the huge step up, particularly in the orders. Thanks very much.

Jeff Clarke, Chief Executive Officer, Dell Technologies: You bet. Mark, traditional server, the 122% growth, it is primarily our historical enterprise customers. I would stress demand outstrips supply. Demand was even greater than the results that we published there. We are supply constrained. But demand is from our traditional enterprise customers. That is where the vast majority of the workloads are. That is where the modernization is occurring. That is where the aged install base is. That is where the heightened awareness around security and resiliency has been driving demand. I introduced last quarter that we are beginning to see AI servers, and when I talked about that, it would be the same that happened this past quarter, that there are Neoclouds buying that. Some of our high-frequency trader customers are buying those types of servers, as well as very advanced in their AI deployments, our largest and most sophisticated enterprise customers.

So vast majority of that 122% growth are traditional customers across all segments, all geos. AI servers are beginning to show up with that set of customers, which is exciting to see. That grew quarter-over-quarter. It grew across Neoclouds. It grew across our HFT customers as well as our enterprise customers. So that is exciting to see. And then the mix inside our traditional AI business is exciting, and something that we have talked about, and I think we mentioned in our remarks, we now have more than 6,500 customers buying Dell AI Factory. 3,300 of them have happened in the last three quarters. It took us eight quarters to get to the first 3,200. That acceleration is enterprise. Enterprise customers grew quarter-over-quarter, year-over-year. Repeat buyers grew quarter-over-quarter and year-over-year.

Enterprise revenue grew quarter-over-quarter and year-over-year, and the pipeline of enterprise customers grew sequentially as well. So we are seeing more enterprise customers. The mix did not necessarily change because we are still winning on the sovereign side as well as the large Neocloud side. But the momentum with enterprise, best measured by number of customers, the number of customers that are buying repeatedly is all up and the indicators are strong. And they tend to buy more storage, and they tend to buy more networking when they engage with us, a more complete solution. I hope that helped. Thanks, Mark.

Mark Newman, Analyst, Bernstein: Yeah. Thanks so much.

Operator, Conference Call Moderator, Dell Technologies: And we’ll take a question from Cat.

Jeff Clarke, Chief Executive Officer, Dell Technologies: That work has to be retained. Depending on what type of customer you are, there’s compliance and regulatory requirements about how long that’s got to be retained and what the protection policies are with that. You have another new source of growth for storage. You see the same happening with KV cache and how it’s being used in driving more efficient inference. We see multiple new lines or new paths for storage growth in our businesses. If we think about this across agentic workloads as we head towards physical AI and what’s going to happen in manufacturing and IoT sensors and robotics, which drive tremendous amounts of multimodal unstructured data, Arthur likes to call it unstructured repositories. There’s a lot of structured data in databases. The growth of that is immense, and we actually see it accelerating, not slowing down.

That goes the AI engines to make sure that they can actually produce something even more worthwhile to help the agents be more efficient, et cetera, to help training. That virtuous cycle, we believe, is just starting. As we understand it today, we’re very optimistic about the growth of storage going forward in the AI world. We’re positioned quite well across all of our storage assets. We protect data. We store all forms of data. As we build more of our data automation platform, we think about our data management work, I think we have a huge opportunity to grow and to be even more important to our customers as their data needs grow. Thanks, sir.

Operator, Conference Call Moderator, Dell Technologies: Our next question will come from Asiya Merchant with Citi.

Asiya Merchant, Analyst, Citi: Great. Thanks for taking my question, and great results here. Can I just ask a little bit about supply? Jeff Clarke, I know you mentioned supply constraints. Maybe if you can just help us understand where the supply constraints, have any things changed from the last quarter? Clearly, some of the component makers are talking about supply agreements that have been signed. How do you think about your supply going ahead, and what we should think about where some of the incremental supply constraints are perhaps relative to last quarter in order to meet the demand durability that you’re talking about even going into next year? Thank you.

Jeff Clarke, Chief Executive Officer, Dell Technologies: You betcha. How I think about supply, as I’m often reminded by our sales force, it’s not enough. We are doing everything we can to get more supply. In today’s environment, that’s a very difficult task. What we’ve been doing is, I think, optimizing the bits and bytes that we have coming in, whether that be with configuration, that being building net sets to maximize the output of the corporation out of the factories. Our ability to increase guidance by the $25 billion is a direct reflection of our ability to optimize what’s coming in, shaping demand, planning it accordingly, and getting it out the door. One of the things that we did earlier this year as we saw the PC market showing signs of softening in the second half, we optimized the bits and bytes we have towards the infrastructure business.

There’s a lead time associated with that. We’re working through that lead time, which is part of why the second half looks a little better. We’ve been able to realize greater shipments as a result of that. The constraints remain the same. DRAM, DRAM, followed by NAND, NAND. We have spotty CPU shortages. There are shortages with disk drives. If you go further down in the supply chain, just about every product going through a leading node is constrained. Mature nodes that are building MOSFETs, power ICs, microcontrollers, drivers are constrained. There’s shortages of ABF substrate, T-glass, all of which we monitor. There’s shortages in optical. The AI supply chain is working red line all out to build Coolant Distribution Units, power racks. Welcome to the life of a supply chain person at Dell Technologies. This is what we do, chasing parts. We love it.

Trying to optimize the outcomes for the company. I think we’ve done largely a good job of that with the second half guide up, and we’ll continue to focus on trying to get more supply and take the supply we have and optimize the output. Thanks, Asiya Merchant.

Operator, Conference Call Moderator, Dell Technologies: The next question will come from Aaron Rakers with Wells Fargo.

Michael Tsvetkov, Analyst (on behalf of Aaron Rakers), Wells Fargo: Hi, guys. This is Michael Tsvetkov on behalf of Aaron. Thanks so much for letting me ask the question. I wanted to ask on the storage business, obviously very strong. Within that, you mentioned several solidly performing Dell IP portfolio products. One of which I wanted to ask about is Project Lightning. How is that contributing at this point, and what level of attach are you seeing to those cloud AI server deals?

Jeff Clarke, Chief Executive Officer, Dell Technologies: For Project Lightning, our parallel file system. There’s an echo, sorry. Parallel file system designed for native AI use cases. We continue to have the product out in the field. We continue to see interest. It’s still a relatively new product. It’s in beta at several customers. We’re in runoffs against other competitors with the product. That will continue, and as it builds momentum, I’m certain we’ll give you an update in the future. But that’s where Project Lightning is at the moment.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Operator, Conference Call Moderator, Dell Technologies: Our next question will come from Joseph Cardoza with JPMorgan.

Joseph Cardoza, Analyst, JPMorgan: Hi, guys, and congrats on the results here. Thanks for the question. Maybe can you guys, and I know you guys haven’t talked about the traditional business here at length, but maybe just curious if we break down the growth that you’re seeing on the traditional server and storage side between volume and pricing. Relative to your earlier view, how much of the upside is coming from each of those vectors? Maybe more importantly, as you think about going forward and the momentum you’re seeing in the business, how are you thinking about headroom for customers to keep on digesting these higher prices? In your customer discussions, are you starting to see any pushback there? Thank you.

Jeff Clarke, Chief Executive Officer, Dell Technologies: Parsing servers and storage by revenue and growth. Let me try. If I look at servers and what we’re seeing in traditional servers, we’re seeing, again, this notion of modernization that’s driving higher core count, more DRAM, and more storage. Those configurations are part of this modernization or consolidation, and they continue to grow rapidly. They cost more than they did last quarter and the quarter before and the quarter before. So there’s a notion of inflation inside our growth. But the underlying demand for the technology is significant. I think about the new use cases, that’s all new use cases, all new growth, which is being driven by agentic AI, essentially running the harness, if that makes sense. We continue to be optimistic about the prospects. Again, demand outran supply last quarter. Demand outran supply this quarter. The pipeline remains robust.

David just gave an update on guidance of the server business, which is very healthy. Clearly, there’s a component of that driven by the price increases as our input costs continue to go up. Storage is a very similar story, as I think I mentioned in one of the earlier questions. As we see a ramp down of our partner IP portfolio, it’s being offset by more units in our Dell IP portfolio that come with higher revenue and higher margin rates. We’re seeing a greater use of our storage products in AI applications, which is good to see, most notably with our unstructured products, which had unprecedented growth. Again, but I rattled off a bunch of numbers earlier about every category of our traditional or core Dell IP portfolio growing multiple quarters now. The Dell IP stack has grown six consecutive quarters now ahead of the marketplace.

We expect to take share again. Clearly, some of that is uplifted by the increased cost of the underlying material. Our software-defined products are doing well in the storage portfolio, which is incremental business for us. I hope that gave some color. Thanks, and we’ll take one more question before we go to the close.

Operator, Conference Call Moderator, Dell Technologies: That question will come from David Vogt with UBS.

David Vogt, Analyst, UBS: Great. Thanks, guys, for squeezing me in. Maybe for Jeff and David, can you help us understand sort of the long-term margin differentials as customers modernize to next gen servers off of older generation servers like 14G on the way to 17G, 18G? How much of the margin uplift that you’re seeing in ISG comes from a like for like margin lift as we modernize data centers versus sort of your efficiency improvements and scale economics that you’re seeing just from more volume going through the supply chain? Thanks.

David Kennedy, Chief Financial Officer, Dell Technologies: Yeah. I mean, if you look at our Q2 results here, ISG up 15 points. Obviously, tremendous performance. As Jeff Clarke outlined it earlier, the number one driver here is a scale conversation, given the growth that we are seeing and the accelerated growth that we are seeing. That for the ISG business was a driver of just over 400 basis points. For the full year guide, it is worth over 650 basis points. You see the leverage that we can adopt into the ecosystem. Outside of that, you then, as you do your storage growth, and again, as we drive that 13% guide or 15% guide, excuse me, for the full year, that $2.5 billion of incremental storage is a huge drag in terms of revenue dollars that we have pushed through.

As you look at our guide for the second half of the year then for ISG, you will see it is up over a point in the second half, and you will see it grow from Q3 to Q4 also, even with the expansion of AI, which is over 3x growth year-on-year at the $74 billion guide. So all of that is kind of contributing to a robust portfolio. Across the rest of the portfolio, it is really about product mix, geo mix, and just traditional execution, pricing discipline, and operational rigor across our supply chain engineering and sales teams.

Operator, Conference Call Moderator, Dell Technologies: All right. We will move it over to Jeff Clarke to close this out.

Jeff Clarke, Chief Executive Officer, Dell Technologies: Sure. Thanks, Paul Franz. Thanks, everyone, for joining us today. Our advantages are compounding, our addressable opportunity is expanding, and our differentiated operating model is delivering significant leverage, with our full-year OpEx rate at a 42-year low. We raised our full-year guide by $25 billion to $192 billion, with $25.50 of EPS. We are optimistic about a stronger second half and the momentum we carry into next year. Thanks, everyone, for your time today.

Operator, Conference Call Moderator, Dell Technologies: Thank you. That does conclude today’s conference with you. Thank you for your participation, and have an excellent day.