On October 14, Barclays downgraded Dell and HPE from "overweight" to "neutral," saying valuations have run too far and commodity costs had lifted revenue, but the bank has yet to see a meaningful AI inflection point.
Dell, JERA and Rhaelm have reached an agreement to build a $15 billion, 400 MW data center and adjacent power plant in Chiba Prefecture near Tokyo, financed by Apollo, expected to begin operations around 2028 and not connected to the public grid. The three parties also plan to promote standardization of data center and power infrastructure construction.
Clarke said agentic AI is fundamentally different from past hardware cycles, and if AI workloads keep growing, shortages of key components such as memory and HDDs could last more than five years. He expects data center compute to add 200 gigawatts by 2030 and inference token generation to grow 87-fold, with agentic AI deployed in a hybrid manner. Despite current server shipment declines, long-term demand growth remains intact, and Dell is operating on the assumption of multi-year component shortages.