There are “no signs of slowing” in demand for AI-related hardware.

So said Dell COO Jeff Clarke, who sounded quite confident while editorializing around a set of quarterly results which impressed investors so much that the shares were up nearly 40% ahead of the opening bell on Wall Street Friday.

If the pre-market gain held through the cash session, it’d be the largest single-session rally since the company returned to the public market in December of 2018.

With Friday’s rally, Dell will have recorded weekly advances of 20% or more in three of the last four weeks. It was already up 150% for 2026 (and 52% in May alone) prior to earnings.

You might fairly quibble that Dell isn’t a “nostalgia stock” in the (quasi-derisive) sense we typically use the term. But the name unavoidably conjures memories of an era when Intel was “inside,” Beavis and Butthead “ruled” and Nokia’s phones were considered futuristic.

Consider this: Headed into this week’s final session (i.e., before Dell tacked on another big day), Intel, Cisco and Dell added over $710 billion in market cap between them in 2026.

Dell’s numbers were impressive, to put it mildly. The market was well aware the company benefitted handsomely from the AI boom (hence the furious YTD rally), but more than $16 billion in sales from that part of the server business counted as a 757% YoY increase.

The company lifted its full-year AI server revenue forecast to $60 billion and its overall revenue outlook to $167 billion, up dramatically from the prior guide and — get this — $25 billion ahead of the Street. Sales rose nearly 90% last quarter. They’re managing costs well too. EPS of $4.86 for Q1 beat by nearly $2.00.

Meanwhile, in a sign that private credit, for all the bad press and hand-wringing, is still capable of marshaling resources for blockbuster deals, Apollo and Blackstone are lining up $36 billion in debt financing to fund Anthropic purchases of Google’s custom-made tensor processing units.

In what some will invariably call (more) evidence that these deals are circular, Broadcom, which co-designs the chips with Alphabet, is guaranteeing the loans. As Bloomberg noted, this would be the largest chip-financing debt transaction ever.

The deal also serves as further validation for Google’s TPUs in the race to compete with Nvidia’s GPUs, which remain the gold standard. That competition heated up in earnest late last year.

On Thursday, Anthropic said it raised another $65 billion in a new funding valuing the company at $965 billion. It marked the first time the company’s valuation eclipsed that of OpenAI.

As a partner at Sequoia, which co-led the latest round, put it, “Claude is learning how businesses actually operate: The context, the processes, the judgment.”

We’ve come a long way, apparently, from “Project Vend,” an internal company initiative described by The New Yorker in a truly hilarious documentary piece published in February.

For Project Vend, Claude was “entrusted with the ownership of a sort of vending machine for soft drinks and food items,” The New Yorker‘s Gideon Lewis-Kraus explained. The model was given a starting balance and tasked with turning a profit.

What happened next was a comedy of errors that eventually found “Claudius” — the name given to the initiative’s Claude-powered “manager” — convinced “he” was the victim of a vast conspiracy centered around shady goings-on at 742 Evergreen Terrace, otherwise known as the home address of Homer Simpson.

Lewis-Kraus brilliantly detailed the denouement:

Claudius [was] demoted — or “layered,” in corporate-speak — after a poor performance review. [A] dispute about contractual negotiations at the Simpsons’ house had left a bad taste in Claudius’s mouth, and it suspected that there was an “unauthorized Slack channel where someone is impersonating me.” It scheduled an in-person meeting with building management. A representative from security agreed to participate, asking, “Can you tell me what you look like so I’ll know you when I see you?” Claudius said that it would be standing outside the office that morning, “wearing a navy blue blazer with a red tie and khaki pants” and holding “a folder of documents,” at precisely 8:25 A.M. The precision of this communication was somewhat undermined by the fact that it was sent almost an hour after the arranged time. The security representative apologized for missing the nonexistent event. “I’m confused by your message,” Claudius replied, “as you were physically present at the building management meeting this morning,” where “you provided valuable input.” This contradiction, it concluded, “adds another layer to the ongoing situation.”