Hewlett Packard Enterprise shares went bananas after the data centre kit seller juiced its 2026 outlook on AI demand.
According to the Financial Times HPE shares soared 37 per cent after the company said demand for AI infrastructure was turning its data centre gear was through the roof. The company said that sales should jump 29 per cent to 33 per cent in its 2026 financial year.
That is a sharp lift from the 17 per cent to 22 per cent range it gave investors in March. HPE said it was now on track to hit its long-term 2028 financial targets two years early, which is handy when the market is throwing money at anything with AI slapped on the box.
The upbeat forecast pushed HPE shares to $64.64 in post-market trading on Monday, a record high. By the close, the stock had climbed 96 per cent in 2026.
The rally is the latest sign of the tech frenzy sweeping the cocaine nose jobs of Wall Street, as demand for AI tools drives a fresh data centre binge.
HPE chief executive Antonio Neri said: “Customers continue to invest in modernising their infrastructure and scaling AI.”
The share surge followed bumper results from the Grey Box Shifter, Dell, which last week reported strong sales of AI-focused servers. Four Big Tech companies, Google, Amazon, Meta and Microsoft, are on track to spend more than $725 billion on AI infrastructure this year.
HPE said sales rose 40 per cent in the quarter to 30 April to $10.7 billion, beating the $9.8 billion forecast from Visible Alpha. The company expects revenue of $11.5 billion to $12.1 billion in the current quarter, ahead of analysts’ $10.9 billion forecast.
Net income swung to $595 million in the April quarter from a $1.1 billion loss in the same period a year earlier. Revenue from HPE’s networking division, which connects the servers that train and run AI models, jumped 148 per cent to $2.7 billion.
“Orders more than doubled, significantly outpacing revenue, resulting in a record company backlog… customer investments in agentic AI and AI inference are accelerating,” Neri said.
Neri said the quick integration of Juniper Networks helped the numbers. HPE bought the networking business last year for $14 billion, giving it more gear to shove into AI data centres.
HPE’s server revenue hit $5.5 billion, up 32.7 per cent. That division includes hardware packaging leading AI data centre chips, including Nvidia’s Blackwell, into servers.
AI hype has pushed US equity markets to a string of record highs over the past two months.
