
What Dell and Salesforce Tell Us About Where the AI Money Actually Goes
Two earnings reports, two very different stories. One company sells the shovels, the other's trying to figure out what to do with the gold.
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Is AI actually making anyone money yet, or are we still in the "sell picks and shovels" phase?
I've been asking myself this question a lot lately. When I was at Kuka, we went through something similar with Industry 4.0. Everyone was buying sensors and connectivity hardware, but the companies actually trying to use all that data? They struggled for years to show ROI. History doesn't repeat, but it rhymes, as they say.
This week gave us two earnings reports that, put side by side, tell you everything you need to know about where we are in the AI hype cycle.
Who's actually winning here?
Dell just raised their annual outlook to $167 billion in revenue, with $60 billion coming from AI server sales alone. Bloomberg reports this far surpassed analyst estimates. Sixty billion. In servers. That's a staggering number, and it tells you that companies are absolutely throwing money at AI infrastructure.
Meanwhile, Salesforce gave what Bloomberg called a "lukewarm outlook," projecting about $11.3 billion for their fiscal second quarter, just under what analysts expected. The stock got hammered. Why? Because investors are worried that AI might actually disrupt the software business that Salesforce dominates.
Look, here's the thing. Dell sells the hardware that makes AI possible. Salesforce sells software that AI might replace, or at least change dramatically. One company is in the infrastructure layer, the other's in the application layer. And right now, infrastructure is eating everything.
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