Dell shares fall 11% after Barclays downgrade — CNBC
In the United States, shares of Dell Technologies fell 11% on Wednesday, leading a sell-off in stocks of companies that produce data center equipment. The decline came after Barclays analysts downgraded Dell, Hewlett-Packard Enterprise and NetApp over concerns about the pace of artificial intelligence adoption by corporate customers, CNBC reports.
Barclays revises its ratings
Barclays downgraded Dell, HPE and NetApp from a rating equivalent to “buy” to “hold.” The analysts said they do not see a “material AI inflection point” in the spending of these companies’ corporate customers.
According to the bank, high revenue in the corporate segment is currently better explained by the global memory shortage and rising memory costs, which infrastructure companies pass on to customers. Barclays analysts noted that businesses allocate an average of only 5% of IT budgets to AI, while hardware accounts for about one-quarter of total corporate AI spending.
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Pressure on the infrastructure sector
Along with Dell, shares of Hewlett-Packard Enterprise, Oracle and Super Micro also declined. Server manufacturers and other data center equipment makers had previously been among market favorites amid expectations of sustained demand for AI systems. Since the start of the year, Dell shares have risen by more than 300%, according to CNBC, HPE shares by about 160%, while NetApp shares have doubled.
Investor sentiment toward AI infrastructure has also worsened amid data on OpenAI’s revenue and concerns that rising interest rates will complicate financing for projects, a significant portion of which depend on debt. Oracle shares lost 9% on Wednesday and have fallen 33% since the start of the year, while CoreWeave dropped 15%, erasing all of its gains for 2026.
The memory sector also came under pressure after China’s ChangXin Memory Technologies reported progress in developing a new chip architecture. Over the week, Micron shares fell 11%, SK Hynix shares in U.S. trading declined 13%, and Western Digital shares dropped by more than 8%.
