Here's the biggest thing keeping AI stock investors up at night
Brian Sozzi · Executive Editor
Wed, September 2, 2026 at 12:55 PM GMT+3 3 min read
Investors in AI stocks are not without their long list of worries — chief among them is that demand is peaking.
"There was a notable discrepancy between management teams' outlooks for fundamentals and investors' outlooks for share prices," said Deutsche Bank analyst Melissa Weathers in a new note on Wednesday.
The note recapped a recent conference DB had, hosting tech execs from the likes of Intel (INTC) and Sandisk (SNDK) and investors in the space.
"Fundamentally, most companies in attendance signaled steady and strong trends, especially the supply chain names gearing up for more advanced processor architectures, higher memory demand, etc. Many management teams signaled confidence not only in industry-wide trends (confidence spanned across sub-sectors like processors, broad-based semis, semicap, etc), but also company-specific efforts to expand margins and drive EPS power.
By contrast, investor sentiment has soured materially from the enthusiasm seen in the first half of the year, with "peak cycle" fears common among many investors. Much of this bearishness stems from ongoing concerns of demand destruction caused by DRAM pricing and technological innovation to break through the "Memory wall", Weathers explained.
The AI stock worrywarts may want to take a moment to breathe and reassess the landscape. Because the reality is new data suggests we are nowhere near peak anything related to AI!
Dell (DELL) shares rose nearly 10% in pre-market trading today as the server and PC maker issued fiscal year 2027 revenue guidance some $25 billion above analyst estimates. The company's ticker page is the most visited on the Yahoo Finance platform.
Driving the strong guidance was a strong fiscal second quarter. Sales surged 58% from the prior year to a record $47 billion. Earnings per share skyrocketed 273% from the prior year.
The blockbuster financial performance was spearheaded by explosive, persistent demand for AI-optimized server infrastructure, as enterprise customers and cloud hyperscalers expanded their data center footprints.
"We think Dell remains well positioned to sustain outsized revenue/EPS growth over the next several quarters driven by combination of AI compute + Enterprise server/storage demand," EvercoreISI analyst Amit Daryanani said.
The super upbeat vibe was seen at Nvidia (NVDA) when it reported earnings a few weeks ago.
Nvidia said after reporting its fiscal second quarter earnings that it sees 70% revenue growth for fiscal year 2028. This was above analyst forecasts for 45% growth. The sales gain would be larger — think greater than 100% — if not for memory chip shortages, said Huang.
"Nvidia has raised the bar further in the AI arms race," said BofA analyst Vivek Arya.
As icing on the cake, PWC said in a report on Wednesday that global data center spending is set to reach $31.6 trillion through 2050. The figure could jump to $50 trillion if the AI buildout in the country exceeds historical infrastructure investment cycles such as railroads, electrification, and the internet.
Brian Sozzi is Yahoo Finance's Executive Editor, host of the 'Power Players With Brian Sozzi' podcast and a member of Yahoo Finance's editorial leadership team. Follow Sozzi on X @BrianSozzi, Instagram, and LinkedIn. Tips on stories? Email brian.sozzi@yahoofinance.com.
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