Dell's component shortages have spread beyond memory, storage and CPUs to rack-level cooling, networking and power gear, Chief Operating Officer Jeffrey Clarke said on Dell's earnings call, reported Supply Chain Dive.
A buyer ordering AI server racks now has to plan lead times around cooling, networking and power components, on top of the memory and CPU delays already built into the schedule.
Large customers are moving to the front of the line by sharing their own demand forecasts with Dell through collaborative planning tools. Clarke called that “a new phenomenon” in the current supply environment. Dell also redirected components it had bought for PCs into AI servers, after its own data showed PC demand would soften in the back half of the year.
The shift toward AI supply helped Dell raise its fiscal 2027 revenue guidance by $25 billion, Clarke said. CFO David Kenney put the new full-year forecast at $192 billion.
“Welcome to the life of a supply chain person at Dell,” Clarke said. “This is what we do, chasing parts. We love it.”
Three months earlier, Clarke described memory alone as the constraint, saying Dell was repricing "every day" and expected to exit the year with a meaningful backlog. The Global Electronics Association traced that squeeze to memory makers shifting wafer capacity toward high-bandwidth memory for AI chips, cutting into the conventional memory servers use.
HPE, competing for many of the same memory suppliers, says it isn’t seeing the same spread. CEO Antonio Neri said in June that long-term agreements with memory suppliers were holding its supply and that “we have not seen any pull in.”
