-- Dell Technologies (DELL) and Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) are positioned to benefit from rising demand for CPU-intensive infrastructure as agentic artificial intelligence drives more complex inference workloads, BofA said in a Monday research note.
Agentic AI is expected to increase infrastructure spending by turning single inference events into multi-step, persistent workflows that require more CPU processing, storage access, and execution capacity.
BofA said the shift toward agentic AI increases the importance of CPU-intensive compute across the inference stack, including model loading, prompt processing, and token generation.
The brokerage views Dell and Hewlett Packard Enterprise within the server market as share gainers among original equipment manufacturers due to increased demand for both AI servers and traditional server infrastructure, as well as storage systems.
However, BofA expects a moderation in demand growth in the second half due to memory pricing pressures.
The firm reiterated its buy ratings on Dell and Hewlett Packard and raised its price targets to $246 and $38 per share, respectively, from $205 and $32 earlier.
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