New York, June 3, 2026, 04:16 EDT
- Hewlett Packard Enterprise jumped 19.5% to close at $56.15 Tuesday. Shares slipped 1.5% to $55.30 before the bell.
- Hewlett Packard Enterprise lifted its fiscal 2026 revenue growth guidance to a range of 29%–33% following record second-quarter sales.
- Big banks like Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan, BofA, and UBS quickly upped their targets after the report.
Hewlett Packard Enterprise Company shares slipped in early premarket action Wednesday, trimming some of Tuesday’s AI-fueled surge as investors parsed the company’s latest earnings for clues on growth. The stock jumped 19.5% to close at $56.15 Tuesday. Ahead of the bell, shares were quoted down 1.5% to $55.30 a little after 4 a.m. in New York. NYSE regular trading was still hours away, with the opening bell at 9:30 a.m. ET on a standard U.S. trading day.
Why does this matter? HPE isn’t just seen as an old-school enterprise hardware stock anymore. Now, investors are trading it on the AI-infrastructure story, with demand for servers, networking equipment and storage to support AI workloads.
Hewlett Packard Enterprise reported its fiscal second-quarter revenue jumped 40% to $10.7 billion. Non-GAAP earnings per share, which strips out some costs, came in at 79 cents. That topped earlier guidance. Free cash flow was $900 million, the company said—cash remaining after covering operating costs and capex.
HPE’s updated outlook drove the action. The company now sees full-year revenue growth at 29% to 33%. Adjusted EPS guidance is also up, now at $3.35 to $3.45. HPE said profit and cash flow targets have already topped where it thought they’d be all the way out in fiscal 2028.
Hewlett Packard Enterprise CEO Antonio Neri said customers are still spending on upgrading infrastructure and AI, according to the company’s release. CFO Marie Myers told Reuters the quarter’s main boost came from HPE’s core server business, with demand coming from enterprise customers outside of the large cloud firms.
HPE price targets were reset in a hurry. Morgan Stanley’s Erik Woodring bumped the firm’s target up to $71 from $33, holding on to an Equal Weight, StockAnalysis said. Investing.com said Woodring pointed to better server pricing and orders compared to three months ago. UBS lifted its target to $65, Raymond James went to $74, JPMorgan set $68 and BofA pushed to $80.
The competitive angle is about Dell Technologies and Super Micro Computer, not HP Inc., which is the PC and printer business. Reuters said at least 12 brokerages raised HPE price targets, connecting the stock move to AI server demand. The same trend has helped Dell and Super Micro lately, with big tech firms boosting data-center spending.
Cloud & AI revenue at HPE climbed 22.9% to $7.7 billion, while server revenue gained 32.7%. Networking revenue surged 148.2% to $2.7 billion, boosted by the Juniper Networks deal and higher demand for networking fabric inside AI data centers.
Neri told analysts that HPE brought in $1.8 billion in new AI systems orders and starts the third quarter with a $5.9 billion backlog—orders waiting to turn into revenue. He said HPE will handle AI systems deals by focusing on profit and working capital, noting not all AI orders have the same value.
The downside risk hasn’t gone away. AI server orders can be uneven, and if supply constraints last, some revenue might shift to future quarters. Memory chip costs for DRAM and NAND are rising. Margins could take a hit if customers push back on price hikes. Morgan Stanley also flagged weak visibility on enterprise demand past fiscal 2027 after the stock’s strong run.
HPE’s next event comes up soon. The company will host investor programming at HPE Discover on June 16, with Neri set for a keynote and an investor summit. That gives management a shot to prove if Tuesday’s rally was just a quick earnings pop or the first sign of a lasting shift.
