Dell Stock Tanks 11% While Michael Dell Hails the Wave Just Beginning 🌊

Barclays downgraded Dell Technologies to Equal Weight from Overweight on October 14, sending shares of the server maker down 11.27% to $507.93. Analyst Tim Long said his team has not detected a meaningful inflection in enterprise AI spending at Dell, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, or NetApp, and applied the same rating cut across all three names. Long trimmed his Dell price target to $574 from $603, leaving roughly 13% implied upside from the October 14 close, and lowered his HPE target to $77 from $83, about 22% above HPE's $63.11 close.

The Barclays note attributed recent strength in enterprise hardware revenue more to soaring memory costs than to a genuine AI demand shift. "We believe the strong enterprise revenues are more of a function of memory costs than a move to enterprise AI at this time," the analysts wrote. They pointed to the typical 5% slice of IT budgets allocated to AI, with hardware making up roughly a quarter of that spend, and warned that memory prices normalizing and eventually falling could weigh on infrastructure-linked revenue.

The downgrade came one day after Dell's founder and CEO struck a sharply different tone on CNBC. "We have had this sort of wave of usage by the frontier labs and certain companies. Now we are starting to see this wave in the enterprise, but it's really just the beginning. I think there would be a ton of infrastructure deployed around that," Michael Dell said in an October 13 interview, adding that he does not see an AI bubble forming because supply is too tight.

Even after the slide, Dell ($DELL) trades about 303.5% higher year to date in 2026, though the stock sits roughly 14% below its record close of $588.40 set on September 17. Dell has guided third-quarter revenue to $49 billion, up 81% year over year, a print that will test whether Barclays or its CEO has the better read on the enterprise AI cycle.