Dell has warned investors and the world that the cost of its dynamic random access memory (DRAM) and solid state drives (SSDs) is set to soar by as much as 20% as it passes rising supply chain costs on to consumers.
The move was announced in the company’s Q1 2025 earnings call this week by Jeff Clarke, the tech giant’s vice-chair and Chief Operating Officer (via The Register), who cited these costs, as well as ‘the lack of capital expenditure, low market utilization, not a lot of wafer starts’ and memory-intensive artificial-intelligence capable servers as the chief reasons.
Dell has already repriced products across its server business, whether they use AI or not. Providing an update on this in the call, Clarke said that the manufacturing time for Nvidia’s B200 graphical processor units (GPUs) were the chief cause of its current $3.8 million server backlog.
The state of servers and business PCs according to Dell
Discussing computer hardware more generally, Clarke suggested that demand for plain old servers “remained strong in Q1”, while the business PC market has “stabilized”, despite Dell’s consumer revenue falling by $1.8 billion, or 15%.
Clarke mentioned that Windows 10 reaching EOL and the dawn on AI-equipped PCs was making Dell “bullish” about its upcoming PC refreshes, and the “longer-term impact of AI on the PC market.”
But the one we’ve all been waiting for, Dell’s enterprise market revenue, is going from strength to strength. The company’s Infrastructure Solutions Group (ISG) ballooned to $9.2 billion (a 22% increase), with server and networking revenue, having grown by a massive 42% year-on-year, making up $5.5 billion of that.
Dell’s growth predictions suggest that it knows which way the wind is blowing and why it has decided that now is the time to hike DRAM and SSD prices. Its ISG revenue was predicted a 20% boost, while its Consumer Solutions Group (CSG) boosted only by 11%, with all of its other businesses expected to decline.
