Jim Cramer was watching CNBC’s Squawk on the Street on Wednesday, October 14, 2026. He looked at a sharply lower Dell Technologies (NYSE:DELL) and saw an opening: “Maybe this is an opportunity now. Dell is more an opportunity than not.” As of 1:24 p.m. ET, shares traded at $507.58, down 11.34% in the session. Barron’s called it the stock’s worst day in more than a year.
Dell’s Selloff Follows an Enormous Run
Dell is down 11.57% over the past week, and the stock is still up 306.97% year to date. That context matters most here. Cramer is calling an opportunity in a name that has had a massive run and is now selling off hard, and his call should be considered that way, as a pullback in a leader.
ASML (NASDAQ:ASML) shows the same pattern. The lithography maker traded at $1,694.94, down 1.33% in the session and 7.59% over the week, while holding a 59.21% gain year to date. The drop came hours after a third-quarter earnings release showing revenue of $13.06 billion, up 55.2% year over year. GAAP EPS of $14.48 beat the $10.66 consensus, though it includes a gain of about $570 million on equity investments. Cramer blamed Korean memory trading: “We are linked to SK Hynix. And as long as that’s the case and Hynix was down badly, then it didn’t matter what ASML did. This was a great quarter, a really strong quarter. They raised guidance for the third time this year.”
ASML’s chief executive said planned supply for 2027 and 2028 “will not fully meet the demand of our customers,” and some customers want to place orders for 2029 and 2030.
Inflation Backdrop Cramer Blames on Tariffs
Bureau of Labor Statistics index data show September headline CPI rose 3.7% from a year earlier. Jim Cramer said core CPI came in at 2.6%, and Jim Cramer put the prior core reading at 2.4%. Cramer says tariffs and geopolitical disruption are driving the increase. He adds that the burden falls hardest on lower-income earners, which he calls a regressive tax. “If you want to mandate higher prices, you’re going to have a hard time doing it better than this guy. There are so many of these things, right to gasoline, right to diesel. Food is right to diesel and textile.” The tariff link is Cramer’s interpretation, and the CPI data do not assign causes.
Where Two-Year Treasury Yields Stand
The latest available two-year Treasury yield is 4.79%, recorded October 13, 2026. The highest October reading in the available data was 4.84% on October 5. No reading for the current session is available yet.
Michael Dell’s Order Book Argument
Michael Dell, identified on the broadcast as the company’s chief executive, said: “There’s incredible demand. And we’re still at the beginning of the S-curve of this. I don’t think there’s enough supply for it to be a bubble.” Cramer’s response: “Maybe we should be listening to Michael Dell.”
The filings back him up. Dell’s fiscal Q2 2027 results showed a record $60.9 billion in AI server orders and a $95.00 billion backlog. Full-year revenue guidance rose to $192.00 billion. Still, a chief executive describing his own order book is a real signal and also comes from an interested party.
Management said “We are supply constrained,” identifying “DRAM, DRAM, DRAM” as the main constraint. So Dell’s ability to turn backlog into revenue depends on the same memory market that Cramer says is driving trading. Q2 free cash flow also fell 47% to $986M.
Michael Dell is describing a data-center expansion. It is the same wave lifting the suppliers around it: power, cooling, networking, and the server integrators Dell competes with. We rounded up seven of those AI infrastructure identifying, outside the chipmakers, in a free report.
What Would Prove Cramer Right
We could find no same-day reporting that explains Dell’s decline, so the cause of the move remains unknown, and the bull case rests on management commentary and order visibility, and nothing in today’s trading supports it. For the opposing view, see our coverage of Michael Burry’s bearish stance on chip stocks.
Cramer’s read on demand holds up based on the order books at both Dell and ASML, and the test is whether Dell and ASML hold their levels once Korean memory trading cools off. If hardware names keep falling after SK Hynix and the Kospi steady, the memory-linkage explanation fails. The next checkpoint is Dell’s fiscal Q3 earnings report, guided to $49.0 billion in revenue and $6.50 in non-GAAP EPS.