Dell Technologies books record $61B in AI orders in Q2

Dell Technologies just posted numbers that would make most tech companies blush. The company booked $60.9 billion in AI server orders during its fiscal second quarter of 2027, a record that pushed its trailing twelve-month AI order total to $131.7 billion.

The results, announced September 1, 2026, landed well above what investors had come to expect even from a company that has spent the last two years positioning itself as the picks-and-shovels play in the AI gold rush.

The numbers behind the headline

AI-optimized server revenue for the quarter came in at $16.4 billion, exactly double what Dell reported in the same period a year earlier.

Total company revenue hit $47 billion for the quarter, up 58% year-over-year and itself a record. The Infrastructure Solutions Group, the division that houses Dell’s server and storage business, generated $31.8 billion, an 89% increase from the prior year. Traditional servers and networking grew 122% year-over-year. Storage, the slower-moving part of the portfolio, still managed 26% growth.

The backlog figure deserves its own sentence: Dell exited the quarter with $95 billion in AI server orders waiting to be fulfilled. That is not revenue already recognized. That is work already won, sitting in the queue.

Dell reported $2.2 billion in operating cash flow for the quarter, with adjusted free cash flow reaching $8.1 billion. The company returned $4.3 billion to shareholders through buybacks and dividends.

Who is actually buying all these servers

Dell’s customer base for AI infrastructure has now grown past 6,500 accounts, spanning what the company describes as neocloud operators, sovereign government deployments, and traditional enterprise buyers. CoreWeave and Iren are among the named customers, and the U.S. military has also signed substantial contracts.

COO Jeff Clarke and CFO David Kennedy both emphasized on the earnings call that the pipeline of opportunities is multiples of the current backlog.

Nvidia supplies the accelerators that power Dell’s AI servers. Dell essentially assembles Nvidia’s GPUs into rack-scale systems and delivers them with enterprise-grade support, logistics, and financing.

Supply chain constraints, particularly in memory components, had been a known friction point for Dell through much of the AI buildout. Management indicated the company is moving past those bottlenecks, which is part of why the backlog conversion into actual revenue should accelerate.

What the raised guidance signals

Dell lifted its full-year FY27 revenue forecast to $192 billion, a 69% increase over the prior fiscal year. AI-optimized server revenue is now expected to reach $74 billion for the full year, which would represent roughly a tripling compared to the year before.