Analysts at Evercore ISI and Wells Fargo recently raised price targets, while memory inflation creates a high-stakes margin debate ahead of the print.
Dell Technologies (DELL) heads into its September 1, 2026, earnings report amid a sharp divide between Wall Street’s raised expectations and recent selling pressure on the trading desk. The stock climbed 235% this year, hitting an intraday record of $514 on August 13 before pulling back to $434.78 on August 20, according to market data tracked by TIKR.com. Despite the recent pullback, major financial institutions have lifted their price targets ahead of the upcoming print.
In the span of four days leading up to the report, Wells Fargo increased its target to $545, while Evercore ISI raised its target to $550. Evercore analyst Amit Daryanani opened a tactical outperform call on the stock, writing that the company should be able to clear Wall Street’s bar and send shares higher. Daryanani said he expects the company to beat earnings expectations and raise its outlook for the 2027 fiscal year when Dell reports results on Sept. 1. Wall Street currently expects more than 50% revenue growth for the fiscal year, but Daryanani thinks estimates will move higher from there, noting the bar is high but achievable
for the company.
Memory Inflation and the Margin Debate at Dell
The central debate heading into the September 1 financial results centers on component costs and profit margins. According to TrendForce’s memory pricing survey cited in market analysis, conventional DRAM contract prices rose 90% to 95% quarter over quarter in the first calendar quarter of 2026 and another 58% to 63% in the second quarter, while NAND flash prices climbed 70% to 75% in the second quarter. TrendForce expects these shortages to persist, with meaningful new capacity unlikely before late 2027, as memory makers keep diverting output to high-bandwidth chips for AI accelerators.
While higher input costs inflate the dollar value of every server Dell ships and pad top-line revenue, analysts note that the risk sits squarely on gross margins. Morgan Stanley analyst Erik Woodring noted that expectations are broadly elevated for hardware providers in a more challenging setup, given how these companies are viewed as winners in artificial intelligence rather than victims of high memory prices. Within Woodring’s universe, which includes Hewlett Packard Enterprise, HP, NetApp, and Everpure, earnings-per-share estimates have moved 23% higher in the last 90 days. Management has stated that the company is repricing daily to stay ahead of component inflation, making the upcoming earnings report a critical test of whether those pricing adjustments successfully protected margins.
Infrastructure Solutions Group and Rapid Deployment Edge
Dell’s ability to pass costs through to customers relies heavily on speed of delivery and deployment. Speaking at the Bank of America Global Technology Conference on June 2, Arthur Lewis, who leads Dell’s Infrastructure Solutions Group, detailed the company’s deployment speed.
“turn rack into production at a customer site in under 6.5 hours and maintain uptimes of 99.9%, which is kind of unheard of in the industry.”
Arthur Lewis, who leads Dell’s Infrastructure Solutions Group
In addition to AI-optimized servers, the company’s traditional server and networking lines have experienced a separate tailwind. As artificial intelligence applications shift from models that answer to agents that act, more work runs on ordinary central processing units. Lewis noted that an agentic task with 50 calls to the model can throw 250 to 300 calls to the tools, and those tool calls are serial work a CPU handles better than a GPU, helping traditional servers and networking grow 92% last quarter.
Evercore ISI Outlook and Valuation Comparisons
Evercore ISI expects top-line growth to be driven by servers and storage, which Daryanani described as the company’s highest return asset. Daryanani also pointed to increased capital expenditures from major Dell customers CoreWeave and SpaceX as a promising indicator for hardware demand, though he also noted risks from a potential slowdown in information-technology spending, vendor competition, and Dell’s debt balance.
Dell currently trades at around 23 times next-twelve-month earnings, compared to a peer-group mean near 19 times across technology hardware and storage names. Among comparable firms, Hewlett Packard Enterprise sits near 14 times and Lenovo closer to 11 times, while NetApp, the nearest storage comparable, trades around 21 times. TIKR’s valuation model lists the current price for Dell stock at $434.78, with a mid target price of roughly $633 and a street target of approximately $509, representing a potential total return of about 46% and an annualized IRR of about 9% per year.
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