Cisco stock saw a double digit surge on Thursday, highlighting an emerging theme within the AI trade: dot-com-era winners are back.
In a wave of ’90s nostalgia, many of the tech stocks that dominated the market ahead of the dot-com crash have seen an AI-driven pop that’s taken them back to records after years of struggling to reclaim the peak.
Cisco, Dell, and Intel were some of the break out performers of the dot-com craze that are seeing anAI-fueled revival this year.
Here are how the three legacy computer stocks are faring in the AI era.
Cisco
Cisco shares surged after reporting quarterly earnings results that beat Wall Street’s estimates on the top and bottom lines and announcing layoffs.
The stock was up as much as 17% to $119.36 in Thursday’s session following the earnings report, on track to record one of its largest single day gains seen since the dot-com era.
The company’s CEO Chuck Robbins said in an interview with CNBC that AI-driven demand has fueled a “networking supercycle” that Cisco has found itself at the center of.
Cisco stock more than doubled in value each year during most of the 1990s before seeing negative annual returns after the dot-com bubble burst. The company was the third largest company by market capitalization at the end of 1999, but took the next 25 years to reclaim the highs of that era.
Dell
“Dude, you’re getting a Dell.”
So went the famous PC ad of the early 2000s.
The stock disappeared following a deal led by founder Michael Dell to take it private in 2013, but it made a fresh debut in 2018.
In 2026, it’s riding the AI wave to new peaks. Dell stock has gained over 90% less than halfway through the year, and ahead of its fiscal first quarter report.
“The AI opportunity is transforming our company,” the computer maker’s CFO David Kennedy said during it’s latest earnings release. The executive added that Dell’s record-setting backlog is “powerful proof that our engineering leadership and differentiated AI solutions are winning.”
Because Dell went private in 2013 before returning as a publicly traded company in 2018, there isn’t historical stock data to demonstrate its 30-year valuation moves the way there is for Cisco.
However, newspaper clipping from before the dot-com bubble show the company’s meteoric rise.
Dell stock was the top stock of the decade, gaining a whopping 91,863% in the ’90s. For reference, Nvidia stock has grown roughly 1,290% in the nearly three and a half years since Chat-GPT was released in late 2022.
Intel
Intel stock marked fresh record highs after a chip deal with Apple after its latest blockbuster AI-driven earnings beat sent the stock on a tear, crushing its dot-com-era record.
The legacy US chipmaker was the sixth largest public company by valuation at the end of 1999, just ahead of the dot-com bubble burst.
The company has also been a target of the Trump administration’s push to make more high-tech hardware in the US. The government snapped up a stake in the company worth $8.9 billion last August, an investment that’s swelled to about $55 billion at the stock’s recent peak.
“The next wave of AI will bring intelligence closer to the end user, moving from foundational models to inference to agentic. This shift is significantly increasing the need for Intel’s CPUs and wafer and advanced packaging offerings,” Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan said in the earnings print.
