Long-term investors tracking the "HPE stock price forecast" highlight the strong gross margin expansion toward 34–35% as a sign of efficient cost management. The division’s operating profit margin of 21.8% contracted 290 basis points (bps) from the year-ago quarter and 760 bps sequentially. HPE noted lower revenues, a reduced mix of switching businesses and lower revenues from the backlog as the main reasons behind the decline in this division’s operating margin. This helped push the company’s backlog, a measure of orders received but not filled, to $14.4 billion. Dell expects to ship more than $15 billion worth of AI servers in fiscal 2026. This massive uptick in AI server orders was a big reason that analysts at JPMorgan substantially increased their price target. The AI infrastructure boom and hybrid cloud adoption are cited as core growth catalysts in the bullish "HPE stock price forecast" scenarios by several equity research desks.