Daily Tech & GNSS News Digest - May 28, 2026

AI infrastructure earnings stayed front and center as Dell tore the cover off another quarter of triple-digit AI server growth and Salesforce showed Agentforce scaling past a $1 billion run rate. Across the Atlantic, the UK doubled down on a ground-based fallback to GPS — funding a QinetiQ-led consortium to ready a deployable eLoran system — while Septentrio extended its precise-positioning module line and a silicon-photonics inertial startup pulled in fresh capital for GPS-denied navigation.

Tech News

Dell Books $24 Billion in AI Orders, Raises FY27 AI Server Target to $60 Billion

Dell Technologies opened its fiscal 2027 with a record quarter, reporting $43.8 billion in revenue on May 28 — up 88% year over year — with non-GAAP EPS of $4.86 versus the $3.00 the Street had penciled in. AI-optimized server revenue alone reached $16.1 billion in the quarter, a roughly 757% jump, while Dell logged $24.4 billion of new AI orders and generated a record $4.1 billion of operating cash flow.

The bigger signal was the guide. Dell now expects full-year AI-optimized server revenue of about $60 billion, up 144% year over year, and lifted full-year non-GAAP EPS guidance to roughly $17.90 at the midpoint, up 74%. Management framed the print as evidence that hyperscaler-grade racks — built around Nvidia’s latest accelerators, custom silicon from Marvell and Broadcom, and the high-bandwidth memory that just pushed Micron and SK Hynix into the trillion-dollar club — are now flowing into enterprise pipelines at scale.

The result reinforces a theme that ran through this week’s earnings cycle: the AI infrastructure trade is no longer concentrated at the chip layer. Dell’s Infrastructure Solutions Group revenue swelled to $29 billion — up 181% — and the company’s commentary pointed to a multi-quarter backlog deep enough that supply, not demand, will set the pace through year-end.

Pfizer announced a global strategic collaboration with China’s Innovent Biologics on May 28 worth as much as $10.5 billion, anchored by a $650 million upfront payment and up to $9.85 billion in clinical, regulatory, and commercial milestones, plus double-digit royalties on net sales of any licensed product. The agreement covers 12 early-stage and de novo oncology programs spanning antibody-drug conjugates with novel payloads and multi-specific antibodies engineered around differentiated immune-engaging designs.

The deal is one of the largest single transactions a Western pharma has signed with a Chinese biotech and underscores how aggressively Big Pharma is now licensing in Chinese-discovered assets to refill late-stage pipelines facing patent-cliff pressure. For Innovent, the partnership pairs Chinese discovery throughput with Pfizer’s global development, regulatory, and commercial scale. The transaction is expected to close in the third quarter pending the usual regulatory approvals.

Salesforce Agentforce ARR Tops $1 Billion as Guide Wobbles

Salesforce reported fiscal Q1 2027 revenue of $11.13 billion — up 13% year over year and ahead of the $11.05 billion consensus — with non-GAAP EPS of $3.88, up 50%. The headline AI metric: Agentforce annual recurring revenue reached $1.2 billion, up 205% year over year, while combined Agentforce and Data 360 ARR neared $3.4 billion. Salesforce also reported 3.8 billion Agentic Work Units delivered to date across Agentforce and Slack, growing 111% quarter over quarter.

Investors took a different read. CRM has slid roughly 33% year to date as softer-than-expected guidance and continued weakness in pockets of the core software portfolio overshadowed the Agentforce ramp. The print captures a recurring tension in this earnings cycle — AI revenue is real and accelerating, but it is not yet large enough to offset deceleration in legacy SaaS lines that investors had long treated as the steady cash engine.

Additional Headlines

Pfizer’s China push goes wider: Beyond the Innovent deal, Pfizer is making a roughly $1 billion broader commitment in China aimed at deepening local R&D and commercial presence in what remains one of the world’s most strategically important biotech markets.
Starbucks cuts another 300 corporate roles: As part of its ongoing “Back to Starbucks” turnaround, the chain announced a further 300 corporate job reductions on May 28, on top of earlier headcount cuts, with CEO Brian Niccol citing a need to flatten layers and route savings into store-level investment.
Made-in-China EVs cleared for Canadian roads: A trade understanding between Prime Minister Mark Carney and President Xi Jinping will allow Chinese-built EVs into Canada under negotiated terms, marking one of the first major North American markets to formally open to mainland EV exports.
Hexagon closes Inertial Sense acquisition: Hexagon completed its purchase of Utah-based Inertial Sense earlier this month, folding more than 30,000 deployed GNSS+INS units into its assured PNT portfolio and tightening the alignment between Septentrio’s GNSS line and Hexagon’s inertial stack.

GNSS News

UK MoD Backs QinetiQ-Led Team Elaris with £6M for Deployable eLoran

The UK Ministry of Defence has awarded a £6 million contract under its Urgent Compass programme to Team Elaris — a QinetiQ-led consortium that also includes UrsaNav, Roke, and GMV — to develop a deployable enhanced Long-Range Navigation (eLoran) capability as a GPS-independent positioning, navigation, and timing alternative for military operations in contested environments. The two-year assessment phase is targeted at producing a deployable system by April 2028.

eLoran is a low-frequency, ground-based PNT signal that survives the jamming and spoofing increasingly cataloged across hotspots like the Eastern Mediterranean, Black Sea, Russia, Baltics, and the Korean Peninsula — the same theaters the FAA highlighted in its refreshed GNSS interference guide last week. Because eLoran transmits at much higher power and lower frequency than satellite-based GNSS, it is far harder to deny in theater, making it a natural complement to multi-constellation receivers, inertial navigation, and emerging LEO-PNT layers.

The contract is a notable vote of confidence in a technology that the US largely walked away from a decade ago. With the Pentagon’s Resilient GPS smallsat program cancelled earlier this year and procedural-only mitigations only partially closing the gap, allied militaries are increasingly hedging through ground-based PNT — a trend that has now pulled France, South Korea, and the UK into active eLoran-class procurement or trials.

Septentrio Ships mosaic-G5 P6 as ANELLO Pulls in $25M for Silicon-Photonics INS

Septentrio, now part of Hexagon, extended its precise-positioning portfolio with the mosaic-G5 P6, a quad-band GNSS module measuring just 23 × 16 mm and weighing 2.2 grams, aimed squarely at commercial UAVs and industrial robotics where size, weight, and power are tightly constrained. The receiver pairs precise positioning with single- or dual-antenna heading output and integrates AIM+ Premium anti-jamming and anti-spoofing — the same interference-rejection technology Septentrio has been pushing into higher-end survey and rail receivers — while remaining compatible with PX4, ArduPilot, and ROS for rapid integration into autonomous platforms.

In parallel, ANELLO Photonics closed a $25 million Series B-2 round to scale production of its silicon-photonics-based inertial navigation systems, designed to deliver fiber-optic-class performance in a chip-scale package for GPS-denied and contested environments. The combination — a high-precision GNSS front end paired with a manufacturable, low-SWaP optical INS — captures the direction the resilient-PNT stack is heading: tightly coupled hybrid sensors that gracefully degrade rather than collapse when satellite signals are jammed, spoofed, or simply unavailable. Both moves landed against the backdrop of XPONENTIAL 2026 in Detroit, where assured PNT has become the recurring through-line across autonomous ground, air, and maritime platforms.

Key Takeaways

AI server demand is now an enterprise story, not just a hyperscaler one: Dell’s $24 billion in fresh AI orders and lifted $60 billion full-year AI server target show the buildout is widening past the top handful of cloud buyers into mainstream enterprise pipelines — making capacity, not demand, the binding constraint into the second half.
Agentforce is real, but legacy SaaS sets the multiple: Salesforce’s $1.2 billion Agentforce ARR validates that agentic software can compound at triple digits, yet a soft core-business guide was enough to keep CRM down a third for the year — investors are still pricing AI growth net of legacy decay rather than on its own curve.
Allied militaries are rebuilding PNT from the ground up: The UK’s eLoran award, Septentrio’s hardened GNSS module, and ANELLO’s silicon-photonics INS round all point the same direction — resilient navigation is converging on a layered stack of terrestrial signals, jam-aware satellite receivers, and chip-scale inertial sensors rather than any single replacement for GPS.