Dell went from near-obscurity to $25 billion in AI revenue — and now uses AI agents even in financial management
Dell Technologies was on the verge of being written off the corporate map in 2022, when its stock plummeted nearly 33% and the market seemed to have turned its back on the company. Who would have bet that, in less than two years, it would build an AI infrastructure business from absolute zero and reach the staggering mark of $25 billion?
Well, it actually happened. 😮
And the numbers don’t stop there: the company’s total revenue hit an all-time high of $113.5 billion, while orders for AI-optimized servers surpassed $64 billion in the last fiscal year, with a $43 billion backlog still waiting to be delivered.
But what really stands out in this story isn’t just the size of the numbers. It’s how Dell got here and the central role that AI is playing inside the company itself, including in day-to-day financial management, led by CFO David Kennedy.
Let’s dive deep into this surprising turnaround and understand what’s behind this real-time reinvention. 🚀
The comeback nobody saw coming
To grasp the magnitude of this turnaround, we need to rewind a bit. In 2022, Dell Technologies was going through a rough patch: the PC market was slowing down, investors were on edge, and the company’s stock took a brutal hit, dropping nearly a third in a single year. For a lot of people inside and outside the tech industry, it looked like Dell was losing relevance in a market increasingly dominated by cloud giants and software-native companies.
What changed the game was a clear and direct bet on AI infrastructure. While other companies were still debating strategies, Dell went out and built a product and services lineup specifically designed to handle the workloads that AI demands — from ultra-high-performance servers to storage and networking solutions optimized for processing massive volumes of data in real time.
The payoff from that bet showed up loud and clear in the latest numbers. Dell’s total revenue hit $113.5 billion, an all-time record for the company, while the AI infrastructure segment jumped from zero to $25 billion in an incredibly short period. This growth wasn’t a stroke of luck. It was the result of a well-executed strategy, with consistent investments in research, strategic partnerships, and a supply chain capable of meeting demand that grew at a near-exponential rate.
David Kennedy: the veteran CFO behind the transformation
Fortune magazine recently visited Dell’s New York office to sit down with David Kennedy, a 27-year company veteran who was confirmed as CFO in November 2025, after serving in an interim role. In a conference room overlooking the chaos of 34th Street, Kennedy broke down the record-setting performance of the Round Rock, Texas giant, which holds the number 44 spot on the Fortune 500.
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The numbers he shared are enough to make anyone’s jaw drop. In the fourth fiscal quarter alone, Dell logged $34 billion in orders for AI-optimized servers, bringing the annual total to $64 billion. AI server revenue in that same quarter skyrocketed 342%, hitting $9 billion. And the company closed the year with a $43 billion backlog still to be delivered.
Kennedy didn’t hold back his enthusiasm when talking about the future. According to him, the opportunity pipeline for the next five quarters has never been higher. For fiscal year 2027, Dell projects $50 billion in AI-optimized server revenue, which would represent 103% growth over the prior year.
Where is all this demand coming from?
A natural question when looking at these numbers is: who’s buying all this stuff? Kennedy attributed the demand to three major drivers:
- Neo-clouds: next-generation cloud providers that are investing heavily in computational capacity for AI.
- Sovereign AI: governments and organizations that want to maintain control over their AI infrastructure, running models on domestic soil.
- Dell’s existing corporate base: traditional enterprise customers that are now expanding their operations with dedicated AI infrastructure.
In Kennedy’s view, there’s a growing sentiment among organizations that sitting out the AI race is an increasingly dangerous risk. He summed it up like this: the fear of being left behind is becoming more powerful than any other decision-making factor.
Bank of America analysts reinforced that outlook by raising their projections for Dell’s AI servers, bumping the current quarter estimate to around $15 billion and the annual forecast to approximately $60 billion, citing demand that’s running above expectations. Morningstar also revised its fair value estimate upward, noting that the sustainability of AI demand will be a key driver for long-term upside potential.
The supply challenge: the cloud hanging over clear skies
If there’s anything that could slow down this impressive trajectory, it’s the supply of components. Kennedy was straightforward about it: there simply aren’t enough components in the ecosystem to fully satisfy global demand for AI infrastructure.
That said, he argued that Dell’s decades-long relationships with its suppliers give the company a significant competitive edge when it comes to securing available components. Unlike some competitors, Dell provided full guidance for fiscal year 2027 — a sign, according to Kennedy, that the company has firm supply commitments to back up those projections.
On the topic of AI server profitability, which makes some investors uneasy, Kennedy was unfazed. Dell is targeting mid-single-digit operating margins on its AI infrastructure business, a level it has been maintaining consistently. His logic is simple: mid-single-digit margins on $50 billion add up to a whole lot of dollars at the end of the day. 💰
The AI factory: the concept at the heart of the strategy
At the core of Dell’s strategy is what Kennedy calls the AI factory — a complete, end-to-end infrastructure stack built around data. This includes GPU-equipped servers developed in partnership with NVIDIA, a large-scale storage business, and networking systems optimized for AI workloads.
For Kennedy, everything revolves around data. How to manage it, store it, use it, and distribute it efficiently. He highlighted that Dell’s ability to build, deploy, and maintain systems with uptime above 99.9% has been a key differentiator in strengthening customer relationships.
The company already has more than 4,000 enterprise AI factories deployed at customer sites, with over 750 added in the fourth quarter alone. These numbers show that we’re not talking about pilot projects or one-off tests, but real-world, at-scale deployments generating concrete business value for organizations across multiple industries.
Agentic AI in-house: how Dell is transforming its own financial operations
One of the most fascinating aspects of this story is that Dell Technologies isn’t just selling AI infrastructure to other companies. It’s actively using the technology inside its own walls, including in the most sensitive areas of the business.
Over the past two years, Dell invested in modernizing and standardizing its internal systems to lay the groundwork for broader AI adoption. That foundation is now enabling the company to scale the use of agentic AI internally — meaning AI agents capable of executing tasks autonomously, making decisions within defined parameters.
Kennedy detailed how this works in practice within the finance organization:
- AI agents are performing account reconciliations and journal entries.
- Digital twins have been implemented across supply chain and services organizations.
- An internal CRM-powered sales chat model has given back multiple hours per week to the sales team.
The CFO went even further on a personal level. He incubated a team of data scientists within the finance organization itself and built proprietary agents under Dell’s internal governance framework. Kennedy uses AI to optimize his schedule, automate emails, and run detailed analyses of financial forecasts by country and business segment.
The impact on the workforce
The operational discipline that accompanied this transformation came with a human cost. Dell’s headcount dropped by approximately 10%, around 11,000 employees, in fiscal year 2026, according to the company’s 10-K filing. This marked the third consecutive year of reductions at a similar scale. The company spent $569 million on severance in the last fiscal year.
According to the regulatory filing, the reductions resulted from internal reorganizations, limits on external hiring, and other cost-alignment measures tied to the company’s business modernization efforts. Dell stated that, despite these difficult decisions, it remains focused on empowering its employees and attracting, developing, and retaining talent.
Kennedy’s view on AI’s impact on the workforce is that the technology redistributes effort toward higher-value activities. He emphasized that the level of accountability stays the same, especially when it comes to auditor and regulatory relationships. In practice, professionals are getting help to make faster and better-informed decisions.
The importance of data quality and prompts
Kennedy also stressed two fundamental points for anyone looking to successfully implement agentic AI. The first is data quality: you’re only as good as the data you have, so it’s essential to make sure it’s clean and well-organized. The second is the ability to direct the agent in the right format, since an AI agent wants to work 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and needs clear instructions to deliver relevant results. 💡
What these numbers mean for the tech market
Dell Technologies’ financial performance around Artificial Intelligence isn’t just good news for the company’s shareholders. It’s an important signal about the direction the broader tech market is heading. When a company with decades of history and a portfolio as diversified as Dell’s can build a $25 billion AI infrastructure business in less than two years, it’s pretty clear that demand for this type of solution is real, robust, and still far from its peak.
For companies of all sizes still evaluating whether it’s time to invest in AI infrastructure, Dell’s case serves as a reliable barometer. The scale of orders, the size of the backlog, and the company’s revenue growth show that the organizations getting ahead are the ones that have already started building out their computational capacity to support AI applications, whether that means training their own models or integrating AI tools into their existing processes.
On top of that, Dell’s results reinforce something many experts have been signaling for a while: infrastructure is the foundational layer of the entire AI value chain. Without capable servers, fast networks, efficient storage, and integrated management systems, AI applications simply can’t perform at the level needed to generate real business value. This realization is driving AI infrastructure investments at a pace far exceeding what analysts were predicting two or three years ago.
Dell as its own use case: credibility that sells
This approach of being your own success story carries enormous strategic value. When Dell walks into a customer meeting and proposes AI infrastructure solutions, it’s not talking theory. It’s sharing real implementation experiences, concrete lessons learned, and measurable results that happened within its own operations.
That generates a level of trust and credibility far higher than any conventional sales pitch could ever achieve. The company is showing, in practice, that AI agents can transform financial operations, optimize supply chains, and give productive time back to teams. It’s a differentiator that very few companies in the industry can replicate with the same depth and authenticity.
With a projection of $50 billion in AI server revenue for the next fiscal year, a record pipeline of opportunities, and increasingly sophisticated internal use of agentic AI, Dell Technologies is writing one of the most surprising chapters in recent tech history. From a company written off as outdated to a leading player in the AI infrastructure race — a transformation that very few companies of its size have managed to pull off in real time. 🎯
