Dell's Comeback is the Perfect AI Case Study

We discuss Dell’s incredibly impressive price action rally, after its focus on AI infrastructure, and NVIDIA’s latest hardware announcements. We also cover the push toward local and private AI use, along with Dell’s earnings and strong AI server sales.

------
🌌 LIMITLESS HQ ⬇️

NEWSLETTER:    https://limitlessft.substack.com/
FOLLOW ON X:   https://x.com/LimitlessFT
SPOTIFY:             https://open.spotify.com/show/5oV29YUL8AzzwXkxEXlRMQ
APPLE:                 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/limitless-podcast/id1813210890
RSS FEED:           https://limitlessft.substack.com/

------
TIMESTAMPS

0:00 Dell’s AI Comeback
1:34 Private to Public
2:18 Picks and Shovels
4:19 Vera Rubin Goes Live
7:02 AI on Your Desktop
10:16 The New Laptop War
13:01 Open Source Strategy
16:10 The Bubble Landscape
19:02 Trump's Involvement
22:24 Why Dell Matters
26:09 Consumer AI Hardware

------
RESOURCES

Josh: https://x.com/JoshKale

Ejaaz: https://x.com/cryptopunk7213

------
Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here:
https://www.bankless.com/disclosures⁠

Creators and Guests

Host

Ejaaz Ahamadeen

Host

Josh Kale

What is Limitless: An AI Podcast?

Exploring the frontiers of Technology and AI

Ejaaz:
30 days ago, President Trump went on camera and said the following sentence, go out and buy Dell.

Ejaaz:
Since then, Dell stock has surged 80% following two back-to-back blowout earnings,

Ejaaz:
giving them the biggest tech comeback in history.

Ejaaz:
Their stock is up 240% this year alone.

Ejaaz:
Now, Dell is probably the most boring written off tech middle aged company that I can think of.

Ejaaz:
They were the guys that sold my school's IT department server racks back in the day.

Ejaaz:
But a person that goes by the name of Jensen Huang saw something different.

Ejaaz:
Dell sells servers and data center racks that are ideal for training and inferencing

Ejaaz:
data models, specifically the GPUs that he sells.

Ejaaz:
Now, the smart money is showing that AI is flowing down from the chip makers

Ejaaz:
to the guys that actually put the chips together and run them.

Ejaaz:
That's what Dell is doing right now.

Ejaaz:
And in my opinion, Dell's put on a masterclass of how to pivot from a regular

Ejaaz:
company to an AI company.

Josh:
The Dell story is incredible. EJ, do you have any idea how old Dell is?

Ejaaz:
No, very old.

Josh:
40 years old. They IPO'd back in 1988. And what's most interesting,

Josh:
and I find, and the only reason why Dell is probably sitting in this position

Josh:
is because of the founder who has been with them since the beginning of time, Michael Dell.

Josh:
And he's really done an unbelievable job in moving this company through all

Josh:
of the phases that have existed over the last 40 years.

Josh:
When you think about 40 years ago, we didn't even have consumer laptops,

Josh:
consumer computers. We didn't even have the internet.

Josh:
So Dell has been around longer than just about anything. Michael Dell has navigated

Josh:
through all of these transitions.

Josh:
And this most recent transition to AI, he has done so again successfully.

Josh:
Dell has not had the easiest route. In fact, if you switch the chart to all

Josh:
on this thing that we're looking at here.

Josh:
You'll see in 2013, they actually disappeared off of the stock market entirely.

Josh:
Michael Dell took the company private at a $24.4 billion valuation.

Josh:
Fast forward to today, clearly that is different. Clearly they've figured out

Josh:
something new and novel.

Josh:
And that's, I think, what a lot about what we're going to be covering on this

Josh:
episode is the transition that was made most recently, the pivot into becoming

Josh:
one of the major arms dealers in the AI race.

Josh:
So who would have thought that this really old school company could turn itself

Josh:
into a cutting edge, leading edge company.

Josh:
And gosh, there are people who've been holding the stock for decades who are

Josh:
very happy about what's going on. But let's get into what's going on, EJazz.

Josh:
It's clear that Dell's kind of becoming the picks and shovels company.

Josh:
They sit one layer down from NVIDIA.

Josh:
What is their role in this large picture? I mean, two weeks ago,

Josh:
we had that episode where we talked about the AI stack.

Josh:
We talked about where each company sits. Where does Dell sit in this picture?

Ejaaz:
Before I do that, what's hilarious is you asked me to toggle to all,

Ejaaz:
but we can't go back prior to 2013 because they technically went off the public market.

Ejaaz:
Yeah, they delisted. So they delisted. They went for, I think it was like $24 billion.

Ejaaz:
And then they were kind of like in stealth mode for a bunch of years and then

Ejaaz:
came back in an IPO in 2018, I believe.

Ejaaz:
And that's the stock market that we're seeing or the stock chart that we're

Ejaaz:
seeing right now. But to answer your question specifically, everyone knows that

Ejaaz:
in a gold rush, what is the line?

Ejaaz:
You've got to be the one that's selling the shovel specifically.

Ejaaz:
And that's what NVIDIA became for the entire AI boom.

Ejaaz:
AI models went kind of viral. Everyone was using ChatGPT, and smart investors

Ejaaz:
thought to place their money in the chip maker, the GPU maker.

Ejaaz:
Now, what is playing out with Dell specifically is someone has to be the one

Ejaaz:
that assembles the shovels together into kind of like a working mind,

Ejaaz:
right? Into like a working product.

Ejaaz:
And that's what Dell does. they don't make the GPUs, but they make the racks,

Ejaaz:
The cooling systems, and they

Ejaaz:
help integrate all of NVIDIA's GPUs to actually make them functioning.

Ejaaz:
There was a story that we covered, I think it was like a few months ago,

Ejaaz:
where Microsoft had purchased, I think, $300 to $500 billion worth of GPUs that

Ejaaz:
were sitting in warehouses collecting dust, because they couldn't get the power

Ejaaz:
to set this up and power these GPUs.

Ejaaz:
They also couldn't get the cooling systems and the wiring to get all of this set up.

Ejaaz:
Dell kind of like spent the last 40 years creating and perfecting server racks

Ejaaz:
for a completely different kind of adjacent industry.

Ejaaz:
It was like the computing side of things. It was the gaming side of things.

Ejaaz:
And then recently, they kind of pivoted to focus specifically on making their

Ejaaz:
hardware perfect for AI models, inferencing, and training.

Ejaaz:
And that's what has led to this like kind of massive partnership.

Ejaaz:
Now, there's currently a really big conference happening in Taiwan.

Ejaaz:
Taiwan, of course, is obviously the epicenter of semiconductor manufacturing.

Ejaaz:
You've got TSMC out there.

Ejaaz:
Jensen Huang flies there. I think it was like four to five times a quarter to

Ejaaz:
kind of like chat to TSMC and make sure that NVIDIA chips and designs are being

Ejaaz:
constructed in the way that he can.

Ejaaz:
He's had a linchpin on all of this. And there's a big conference going out there right now where

Ejaaz:
Jensen had some really important news updates to share.

Ejaaz:
Now, the first one, the one that was being teased over the weekend,

Ejaaz:
came from none other than Michael Dell himself, the guy that is a CEO and founder of Dell.

Ejaaz:
And he goes, we have the first Dell slash NVIDIA Vera Rubin NVL72 rack live

Ejaaz:
and going. And I actually have a picture of this right now.

Ejaaz:
Now, if you're wondering what the Vera Rubin rack is

Ejaaz:
it is um nvidia's latest gen uh gpu rack and it is going to be the rack that

Ejaaz:
ends up training the frontier models from anthropic and open ai starting probably

Ejaaz:
next year because there's usually like a six month lag they announced it about

Ejaaz:
i think it was like four to six months ago and now we see the first live rack

Ejaaz:
coming to fruition it's pretty cool so

Josh:
This is amazing and unexpected in the sense that i i would have probably expected

Josh:
to see someone like xai or anthropic or open ai getting the first Vera Rubin

Josh:
chips working and actually running.

Josh:
So it's interesting to see it coming out of Dell of all places.

Josh:
And I think the reason why we see it out of Dell is because Dell is in a very unique position.

Josh:
You mentioned like the picks and shovels and how it's creating a working mine.

Josh:
Dell is hardware and AI distribution as a service. It basically builds AI factories

Josh:
for anybody who wants them.

Josh:
And this is their wheelhouse. One of the most interesting things that I guess

Josh:
over time you start to develop relationships with over your 40-year career is

Josh:
relationships with people who have sensitive information. We're talking

Josh:
banks, hospitals, governments who are involved in defense, a lot of these kind

Josh:
of more secure entities aren't really able to go off and use OpenAI or Claude

Josh:
because a lot of the data is secure and they can't let it leave their servers.

Josh:
What Dell is able to do is take this hardware ability, their ability to print

Josh:
out these mines per se, and then give it to these individuals.

Josh:
So give it to a hospital who really needs to use AI, but can't let the secure

Josh:
customer information get off of off-premises.

Josh:
Same thing with banks, same thing with governments. And what we're seeing here

Josh:
is a really strong pivot from them in that sector in a way that I think they're

Josh:
making a lot of progress.

Josh:
I mean, Vera Rubin is one of the first things that they've done,

Josh:
but they've also been working on a lot of other really promising ways of getting

Josh:
AI hardware into the hands of not necessarily your average consumer,

Josh:
but further down the stack, where if perhaps you don't have $100 billion to

Josh:
build out a data center, you can actually just go and spend $80,000 to $120,000.

Josh:
On the new workstation.

Josh:
So just last night, NVIDIA Jensen Huang went on stage in Taiwan,

Josh:
and he was announcing a bunch of new hardware.

Josh:
And one of the hardware pieces that he released was this DGX station for Windows.

Josh:
What is it? It's basically a Blackwell chip in a desktop, which is the most

Josh:
powerful consumer grade supercomputer in the world.

Josh:
And I'm not even sure we could call this consumer grade, because I'm not sure

Josh:
how many consumers are going to spend $80,000 plus on the computer.

Josh:
But essentially, what you have is a Blackwell chip that can sit inside of a

Josh:
room without a custom tooling, without custom data center, and it can run a

Josh:
trillion parameter model locally on your machine.

Josh:
So they're kind of moving down the stack as well. And I think this is what investors are seeing.

Josh:
They're seeing them partnering with companies like NVIDIA and really making

Josh:
strong progress in the world of getting AI accessible to people through data

Josh:
centers, through this consumer hardware, all the way up and down the stack.

Ejaaz:
What I like about this is typically, if you wanted to go out and train your

Ejaaz:
own model from scratch, you would need like billions to hundreds of billions

Ejaaz:
of dollars to be able to do that.

Ejaaz:
It was a very siloed kind of like access only to the rich.

Ejaaz:
And what these new updates or hardware updates are doing is basically disseminating

Ejaaz:
it to like the average kind of like medium sized startup that maybe has raised, let's say,

Ejaaz:
10 to 100 million dollars in funding for them to be able to buy out like a server

Ejaaz:
rack or a couple server racks of this new NVIDIA DGX station.

Ejaaz:
That you should be able to kind of like train some kind of a model, right?

Ejaaz:
Running locally. Now, if you're listening to this and you're still like,

Ejaaz:
well, I'm just a regular consumer. I'm not that business and I want to be able

Ejaaz:
to access and run some of these models.

Ejaaz:
They had another update. NVIDIA announced something called their new ARM-based

Ejaaz:
processor called RTX Spark.

Ejaaz:
So it's basically the equivalent of a GPU RTX 5070 that runs on your laptops.

Ejaaz:
I'm talking about like, not even like a desktop PC, like an actual laptop.

Ejaaz:
It runs at 100 frames per second. And it's, you know, it's pioneered or oriented around modern games.

Ejaaz:
So what the coolest part about this is you can technically run some form of

Ejaaz:
an open source frontier model on your laptop now using this new GPU or this new chip.

Ejaaz:
And what I love about the directional trend that companies like Dell,

Ejaaz:
ARM, and NVIDIA are kind of like aligning together to build is running models

Ejaaz:
on bare metal or locally at home using your own private data.

Ejaaz:
And I think this is, we've said this on previous episodes, but this is incredibly

Ejaaz:
important because you don't want to hand over all your personal data to companies

Ejaaz:
like Anthropic and OpenAI.

Ejaaz:
At some point, it gets a little weird when you start sharing medical records

Ejaaz:
or banking stuff or personal lawyering things. I know a lot of friends,

Ejaaz:
Personally, that do that already. They kind of like upload their therapist notes

Ejaaz:
and stuff and get like kind of information.

Ejaaz:
I'm like, hang on a second. So Sam Altman technically gets access to that right

Ejaaz:
now, right? They can use it for whatever they want.

Ejaaz:
And I think it's increasingly important to own your own hardware going forwards,

Ejaaz:
which is so weird when we have been in an all-cloud world.

Ejaaz:
Now, when you were describing earlier on, Josh, the fact that like Dell is enabling

Ejaaz:
kind of like bare metal training, you know, on-prem running,

Ejaaz:
it reminds me of that story we covered with Amazon. Remember when we were given the Amazon bull case?

Ejaaz:
Yeah. And we were talking about like them building out Amazon Cloud specifically for AI servers.

Ejaaz:
One of their main assets is they run all the governments across the world's

Ejaaz:
AI models because they can like set up racks for themselves.

Ejaaz:
And Dell is kind of becoming a feasible competitor to that.

Josh:
So yeah, I want to take a little side quest here and actually talk about a little

Josh:
bit more of what NVIDIA announced last night because it was really impressive.

Josh:
So we have that RTX Spark, which is this new processor equivalent to an NVIDIA

Josh:
5090. Now, for those not familiar, the NVIDIA 5090 kind of run of GPUs is the

Josh:
cutting edge top of the line for consumers.

Josh:
And generally, if you're a gamer, that's what you always aspire to buy.

Josh:
That's how you can play your games at maximum settings.

Josh:
It's now available inside of a laptop.

Josh:
This chip used to cost thousands of dollars and be pretty beefy.

Josh:
Like this is a huge chip that would weigh like, I don't know,

Josh:
something like four or five pounds.

Josh:
They've figured out how to compress it into a laptop. And not only that,

Josh:
but it comes baked in with 128 gigabytes of memory. so if you're comparing this

Josh:
to a macbook you're thinking well the max spec of a macbook is 128 gigs same

Josh:
with this new laptop so on paper.

Josh:
It's a direct competitor, at least as it comes to training and running models locally.

Josh:
Now, it turns out that Microsoft has actually went ahead and released a laptop

Josh:
with this new chip in it already dubbed the Surface Laptop Ultra.

Josh:
And it seems as if it has the RTX Spark chip based right in.

Josh:
It has a 15 inch mini LED screen, 128 gigabytes of unified memory.

Josh:
And for anyone who cares, one petaflop of AI compute power.

Josh:
I'm not even sure what that translates to, but it sounds like a lot.

Josh:
And this is really interesting to me as someone who loves consumer hardware,

Josh:
because I'm looking at this and I'm thinking to myself, oh my God, this is a MacBook Pro.

Josh:
Um, and it's not, this is the first time I think in a while that MacBook and

Josh:
Apple have had a legitimate competitor and something that can match its spec

Josh:
for spec. And maybe the hardware isn't quite as elegant.

Josh:
Maybe it doesn't have the single unibody aluminum design, but on a spec sheet,

Josh:
it's really compelling. And it has all the ports that you would think of.

Josh:
It has a mini led screen, which is exactly what the new pro display XDR has.

Josh:
This is a serious offering from Microsoft from nvidia and i think it's it's

Josh:
a testament to where things are headed which is like apple might not have their

Josh:
monopoly for too long mac minis have been sold out forever clearly dell wants

Josh:
this microsoft wants this nvidia wants this they're going to try to release

Josh:
their competitors and this is a really strong first stop it's.

Ejaaz:
It's really nice to see like a competitor to apple finally at least on like

Ejaaz:
the hardware mode now now where my um where my kind of brain automatically goes

Ejaaz:
is like microsoft is like this antiquated company right like all the governments

Ejaaz:
use it there they They run like all the old Microsoft

Josh:
Official. And how much does their AI suck? Like they're just falling behind.

Ejaaz:
Dude, it sucks. Like I was listening to like some kind of like podcast over

Ejaaz:
the weekend where apparently Satya Nadella is now like the PM of Copilot.

Ejaaz:
Like he's gone back to the PM role to try and like figure out their Copilot

Ejaaz:
thing like because their head of AI couldn't. So like Microsoft has been kind

Ejaaz:
of been in the dark ages for a while.

Ejaaz:
And like this new update, like this new hardware update brings them into like

Ejaaz:
a new light, which is great.

Ejaaz:
But the number one question is like, are you still going to use

Ejaaz:
their software or their operating system so naturally i was like okay

Ejaaz:
well it's great that they have this new piece of hardware that's consumer

Ejaaz:
accessible but like are there is there any new ai that i can use on this and

Ejaaz:
the answer might have come from jensen himself or nvidia themselves they released

Ejaaz:
a new open source model called nemotron 3 ultra and it is officially the top

Ejaaz:
open source ai model made by an american company um so typically they're

Ejaaz:
Spoken about this a lot on our show, the top open source models have come out

Ejaaz:
of China, which is obviously an anniversary to the US.

Ejaaz:
But Nemotron Ultra is actually quite competitive. And we have like a chart here,

Ejaaz:
a clip or rather a screenshot from Jensen's keynote yesterday or this morning.

Ejaaz:
The time difference is so baffling, actually, which places Nemotron 3 Ultra

Ejaaz:
on par to an extent with Kimi K 2.6, GLM 5.1, and some of the other Chinese open source models.

Ejaaz:
But it's so much quicker the output speed is like

Ejaaz:
by the looks of it like almost like three to five x

Ejaaz:
quicker which is great to see um i don't

Ejaaz:
know what your view on this is josh but i am betting

Ejaaz:
that jensen nvidia and dell and all these companies that are

Ejaaz:
kind of like forming an alliance to go hardcore on open source why because it's

Ejaaz:
going to help with retail distribution across everything right like jensen doesn't

Ejaaz:
know what consumers are going to use these bottles for but if you can get more

Ejaaz:
retail consumers like you or i to buy these different laptops and use his chips,

Ejaaz:
he ends up selling more chips.

Josh:
Yeah, I know, I couldn't agree more. And there's a second factor to it,

Josh:
too, about why they're going to want to continue to improve and push the open

Josh:
source model frontier forward.

Josh:
It's because what we're seeing happen with companies like Amazon and happen

Josh:
with companies like Google is they're building their own custom AI accelerators.

Josh:
And now these companies are beginning to train on more of a proprietary stack.

Josh:
So Google now is training Gemini models largely on its own proprietary hardware.

Josh:
It uses NVIDIA GPUs for a lot of it, but an increasing percentage of that training

Josh:
is done by these TPUs or in the case of Amazon, their Tranium accelerators.

Josh:
And that's not good for NVIDIA because they want the CUDA lock-in.

Josh:
They want the NVIDIA GPU Blackwell Verirubin lock-in.

Josh:
How do you get more of that lock-in to happen? You actually just give away the

Josh:
software stack for free and make it optimally compatible with your hardware.

Josh:
So as they're giving away this open source software, they're saying,

Josh:
hey, you can go run it on our new RTX Spark chip.

Josh:
In fact, it's available in a laptop that you can go and buy today or starting

Josh:
in a couple of months, I think. I think they're releasing in the fall.

Josh:
But they're starting to release the entire stack and they're offering the software

Josh:
as that teaser, as that little value add where you can't get anywhere else.

Josh:
If you want to run NVIDIA software, the best way to do it is on NVIDIA hardware.

Josh:
And it kind of solidifies and ossifies that moat even more. So I think we're

Josh:
probably going to see this trend continue.

Josh:
We're seeing already this beating DeepSeq and a few of the other Chinese open

Josh:
source models on a few parameters.

Josh:
I'm sure it's just a matter of time until all those benchmarks are blown out.

Josh:
If NVIDIA is really putting their full weight behind open source,

Josh:
we're going to have a serious push into open source.

Josh:
And that combined with the hardware that we're seeing with Dell,

Josh:
with Microsoft, it's going to create like a pretty compelling offering for local

Josh:
AI infra that I'm not sure the market has quite priced in just yet.

Ejaaz:
So to bring the story back to Dell, Josh, I want to put our skeptic hats on for a bit.

Ejaaz:
It seems kind of bubbly on the headline value, right? It's like a 40-year-old company.

Josh:
It died, it came back to life. Now it's like going crazy.

Ejaaz:
Suddenly you're like the AI company. This kind of like gives me the old bird

Ejaaz:
story, you know, a shoe company that pivoted to running AI GPUs.

Ejaaz:
I'm just like, what are you doing?

Ejaaz:
Is Dell actually doing anything? Well, they recently released their quarterly

Ejaaz:
earnings report, which wasn't just a blowout.

Ejaaz:
It was their highest recorded revenue quarter.

Josh:
And before you share, actually, I want to note that the post that we're showing

Josh:
on screen is from Michael Dell, the CEO himself.

Josh:
This is a founder-led company who is proud of the growth. He is in the trenches

Josh:
making this happen. So I think that's noteworthy.

Josh:
That's different than a lot of these other companies. It's like,

Josh:
the founder's been doing this for 40 years.

Ejaaz:
Yeah. It's the same guy. They run out of the same office in Texas.

Ejaaz:
It's the same HQ. It's been there for four years, going off,

Ejaaz:
going public, going off public, and then going back on it. It's absolutely unbelievable.

Ejaaz:
Now, a summary of the recent quarter is they increased revenue 88,

Ejaaz:
almost 90% year over year.

Ejaaz:
Almost half of that revenue came from this new business unit.

Ejaaz:
It's called AI servers revenue, up almost 800% year over year.

Ejaaz:
Now, for all the skeptics that were thinking, hmm, I think Dell is kind of just

Ejaaz:
advertising things that they don't actually have, the numbers actually disprove

Ejaaz:
that pretty aggressively.

Ejaaz:
They have over 5,000 major customers that are buying their server racks,

Ejaaz:
including one of the biggest customer being NVIDIA.

Ejaaz:
NVIDIA wants to distribute it through a hardware moat and Dell are the ones

Ejaaz:
that are basically putting their chips together.

Ejaaz:
They're bolting their chips together to make them efficient.

Ejaaz:
They're the first ones to create the new Rubin racks.

Ejaaz:
They have been kind of unofficially crowned a key partner to NVIDIA and like

Ejaaz:
NVIDIA's success is basically going to drag them up.

Ejaaz:
Now the previous quarters of this, at the end of the last financial year,

Ejaaz:
they absolutely smoked as well.

Ejaaz:
So it's kind of been like two to three quarters back-to-back that they've been absolutely killing it.

Ejaaz:
I can't avoid the Trump story. Like, he praised Dell, technically,

Ejaaz:
and now the stock's gone up. Like, I don't know what you think.

Josh:
That's what I was going to say. I'm like, hey, you know who called Dell stock

Josh:
going crazy back in February 10th of this year?

Josh:
Donald Trump. He said, go buy a Dell.

Josh:
And the close at that time was,

Josh:
I think, $126. We're sitting here today recording this. It is now $450.

Josh:
That is a 255% gain or even more. That's close to like 300% now at this point.

Josh:
And that's coming off the back of a week that happened last week where they

Josh:
were up 37% in a single trading session.

Josh:
That's the largest single win that they've ever had in history,

Josh:
in their 40-year history since they've been trading publicly for 30 years.

Josh:
And it'd be interesting if it was a one-off, but this is very much a trend.

Josh:
Another story that we have here today is the newest version of the Trump pump

Josh:
with IBM, where he mentioned IBM over the weekend.

Josh:
And on a Sunday night, it traded up 17% because Trump mentioned IBM.

Josh:
And he didn't even say go buy IBM. He was just praising the CEO publicly on

Josh:
camera and the stock is going ballistic.

Josh:
So it feels like we do have to mention that this is a trend.

Josh:
There are a few other companies you might remember, Intel being a major one,

Josh:
where the government took a 10% stake in Intel.

Josh:
Since then, it's up 300%. And this seems to be a trend over and over again.

Josh:
So I think a lot of people who have been interested in participating in AI,

Josh:
who have been seeing these Donald Trump clips, are like, oh,

Josh:
all right, well, he's saying it, but the stock's already up so much.

Josh:
It's probably not going up any higher.

Josh:
The reality is that anytime he's called something, it's gone nuclear.

Josh:
And I guess that's part of the cycle that we're in, where like you are the president

Josh:
of the United States, you say something, the market reacts.

Josh:
It's similar to like a meme coin. Like it feels like we're watching meme coins

Josh:
pump. It's like you watch for what one guy says, and then the stock goes ballistic.

Josh:
Like you mentioned, there are numbers to back this up. Like

Josh:
Intel and IBM have actually been having pretty amazing quarters, same with Dell.

Josh:
But there is some frothiness happening here in the sense that one president

Josh:
can deliver one line to send a stock up 20%.

Ejaaz:
Yeah, it's this weird, cloudy, murky investment thesis that kind of like involves

Ejaaz:
being crowned by Trump himself, but then also like the numbers and the customers

Ejaaz:
and the purchases are from very legitimate people and companies.

Ejaaz:
It reminds me a lot of the Intel story where I think it was like a year and

Ejaaz:
a half ago, Trump was like, Intel is going to be an amazing company,

Ejaaz:
very key to accelerating AI in the US.

Ejaaz:
And that has been an amazing trade so far, right? I think the stock is up around

Ejaaz:
300% to 400% since he made that announcement.

Ejaaz:
NVIDIA purchased $5 billion worth of equity. The Trump administration bought

Ejaaz:
10% of Intel, which is now up $30 billion as of today's stock price.

Ejaaz:
And so I start to think about Trump being pretty key to forming these partnerships,

Ejaaz:
I bet you because he told NVIDIA or asked NVIDIA to purchase that kind of equity

Ejaaz:
stake in Intel, he's kind of doing similar things with Dell.

Ejaaz:
And if you're wondering why this is the case, the answer is pretty simple.

Ejaaz:
Trump or America in general does not want to rely on Taiwan or Asia in general

Ejaaz:
for building the most foundational technology that the world will ever see.

Ejaaz:
And as a result, they're trying to bring as much of the manufacturing process

Ejaaz:
and hardware process of AI onshore to the US.

Ejaaz:
Now, China and Asia has had such a major head start.

Ejaaz:
Taiwan is a very crucial piece of land that China could take over at any moment.

Ejaaz:
It's kind of obvious why America wants to bring it onshore, but that's going to take a lot of time.

Ejaaz:
And so Trump is obviously aggressively trying to form these partnerships and

Ejaaz:
probably get a stock win in the meantime.

Ejaaz:
I read somewhere that apparently like Trump had bought a position in Dell on

Ejaaz:
his personal account before he made that public announcement,

Ejaaz:
which is just absolutely insane and probably not legal.

Ejaaz:
But, you know, I can kind of see like why the administration is going down that path.

Josh:
Yeah, say what you will, but they're making an aggressive effort to bring this

Josh:
AI trend, this AI world onto the United States soil to build everything domestically.

Josh:
And what we're seeing here is like very clear signal that it's going to continue down this road.

Josh:
And I think what we're seeing with Dell is a testament to what happens when

Josh:
a company run by a founder really leans into the things that they've learned

Josh:
over 40 years and applies that to an industry that really needs help.

Josh:
We have this problem manufacturing things in the United States.

Josh:
We have a very difficult time building things at scale,

Josh:
creating factories that have efficient margins enough to compete with people

Josh:
who are in other countries and companies that are run like ASML and TSMC and

Josh:
all these other ones that are creating all the AI infrastructure.

Josh:
So it's exciting to see a company like Dell really move their whole weight of

Josh:
the company behind this and actually deliver some pretty compelling results.

Josh:
Like they're the first ones to deploy a VeriGPU rack. That's a pretty big deal.

Josh:
We started talking about Mythos and a few of the other like cutting edge models.

Josh:
Uh llms and how they were just getting started training on blackwell

Josh:
like we're getting our first blackwell chips and now suddenly we

Josh:
have vera rubin already going into play training i'm

Josh:
sure is going to begin sooner than some people would

Josh:
have thought because of this accelerated timeline it's really

Josh:
great to see dell is the the builder and we need more builders so i think on

Josh:
like a principled basis dell's a good company for a good reason it's not just

Josh:
because trump is out here saying it uh they're actually making some pretty amazing

Josh:
things and i think it's it's a testament to other companies who are kind of

Josh:
evaluating how to navigate this world of AI.

Josh:
Being useful in the world of hardware is a really compelling value prop that

Josh:
I hope more people follow.

Ejaaz:
It looks like investors probably agree with this as well.

Ejaaz:
Since we started recording, the stock is up 8%, roughly 30 bucks since market opened.

Ejaaz:
It's literally been, what is it, under an hour of market being open.

Ejaaz:
Yeah, I guess to round it out, like the question I want to ask to ask myself

Ejaaz:
is, is this company in particular kind of bubble worthy?

Ejaaz:
I don't have a definitive answer, but it's kind of like yes and no.

Ejaaz:
Yes, because they kind of fell into this opportunity.

Ejaaz:
Honestly, similar in the way that NVIDIA kind of did that, they've been building

Ejaaz:
these kind of GPUs for the gaming industry and a lot of other industries prior

Ejaaz:
to falling into the AI stuff.

Ejaaz:
Now, credit to Jensen, obviously, he saw the trend of LLMs much early on before ChatGPT went viral.

Ejaaz:
Don't think I can give the same kind of credit to Dell themselves,

Ejaaz:
but they have had 40 years expertise in building these hardware racks.

Ejaaz:
And what is the major bottleneck that we've covered on previous episodes,

Ejaaz:
the Gavin Baker episode and the AI hardware stack episode, which you guys should

Ejaaz:
definitely check out, we released them over the last two weeks,

Ejaaz:
is the money is flowing from the chip maker from the consensus bet,

Ejaaz:
which is Nvidia, down to all the constraints that are preventing those GPUs

Ejaaz:
from actually being powered on today, electricity,

Ejaaz:
chemical substrates, as well as the cooling and data center racks themselves,

Ejaaz:
which is what Dell is playing in.

Ejaaz:
So I think there's a huge opportunity for investors that are looking for like

Ejaaz:
that kind of like next bit of exposure to kind of like work their way down the stack.

Ejaaz:
Now, obviously this isn't trading or investment advice, but it's just a trend

Ejaaz:
that we're noticing quite a lot of.

Josh:
Yeah, and like what an amazing opportunity to be an investor,

Josh:
to see all of this. There's so many companies that are undervalued,

Josh:
that are misunderstood, that are kind of pivoting.

Josh:
That are public. Yeah, there's so much alpha to be made in these markets.

Josh:
And it's funny that the president is the one who's surfacing a lot of these,

Josh:
but there actually is a tremendous opportunity for anyone who's curious in investing

Josh:
or participating in the AI stack because so many of these companies that we're

Josh:
seeing exploding, they've been around.

Josh:
They're not that big. They're just pivoting and they're putting themselves in

Josh:
the right place because they understand the business.

Josh:
There's a lot of those hot, flashy, shiny companies, OpenAI,

Josh:
Anthropic, Google, like the ones that we talk about every day.

Josh:
But again, that AI investing stack, as you descend lower into the stack,

Josh:
there's a tremendous amount of opportunities.

Josh:
Dell is one of them. And as we see more people begin to pivot into the places

Josh:
where there are those bottlenecks, I assume we're going to see a lot more of

Josh:
these. So that's the episode.

Josh:
You're caught up with a nice little teaser of the new NVIDIA hardware that was just announced today.

Josh:
I think that's everything. Is there any final thoughts before we let everyone go here?

Ejaaz:
I have. I always like to end the episode on a prompt. And I have one in my head right now, which is.

Ejaaz:
Are you guys going out to buy the new DGX desktop for 80 grand, 80 to 100 grand?

Ejaaz:
Or are you buying the RTX 4019?

Ejaaz:
I'm genuinely curious, because I know that a bunch of our listenership likes

Ejaaz:
to kind of be hobbyists in AI and run their own open source models.

Ejaaz:
We've got a lot of feedback from you guys from previous episodes.

Ejaaz:
I wonder if you guys are going to get indulged in one of these new laptops,

Ejaaz:
one of these new consumer powered GPUs that you can kind of run models locally.

Ejaaz:
And if you are that type of person, what are you using it for?

Ejaaz:
Like, we want to learn as much as we can around the locally run AI models.

Ejaaz:
We think it's going to be a huge thing in the future. So yeah, let us know.

Josh:
But I love how much of a baller you think our audience is. Like,

Josh:
they're just going to go drop 80k on a desktop GPU.

Ejaaz:
That's how highly we think of you. Yeah, I don't know.

Josh:
But I think for like the laptop, at least, as I look at the laptop,

Josh:
I compare it apples to oranges.

Josh:
It's compelling in the sense that I could play video games on it.

Josh:
And I think that's one thing that gamers are really going to appreciate is the

Josh:
fact that there is now a portable gaming machine that is really excellent at games.

Josh:
Because my MacBook, I'm a diehard Apple fan. You know this. I have all Apple products.

Josh:
I can't play games on that. I still got to go play on a PC or on a console.

Josh:
So I think in terms of that niche audience, that's a really compelling thing.

Josh:
So any gamers out there, are you buying this thing? And a 5090 in a laptop is crazy work.

Josh:
I'm excited about it. I might be buying. We got to wait on the price.

Josh:
If it's anywhere close to $80,000,

Josh:
I will be a no, but I suspect it'll probably be in MacBook territory um but

Josh:
yeah that's the episode thank you guys so much for watching if you enjoy this

Josh:
don't forget to share it with your friend it really goes a long way if we've

Josh:
been doing well rate us five stars on your favorite podcast player if you enjoyed

Josh:
and like always we will see you guys in the next episode thank you so much for watching see you guys.