Dell, Cisco, Nokia, Intel. Those names ruled the market 25 years ago, until the dot-com bubble burst and most spent two decades getting written off.
Now they're leading the AI rally.
Seven dot-com era stocks - Dell, Nokia, Lenovo, Micron, Intel, Texas Instruments, and Cisco - have added a combined $1.7 trillion in market value this year, with the average gain across the group hitting 158%.
The Boring Hardware Nobody Was Building
For two years, the AI trade has been about one thing: chips. Nvidia, mostly.
But chips don't run on their own. They need servers, memory, networking gear, and power components to keep the lights on.
The companies that make all of that quietly let capacity wither during the years investors stopped caring.
"There's a massive under-supply in especially the boring hardware space where capacity addition has been very limited," Neuberger Berman portfolio manager Yan Taw Boon told Bloomberg. Demand is now skyrocketing across everything from basic CPUs to networking to memory.
That shortage is what's driving the gains.
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The Standouts
Micron leads the pack. The memory chip maker just joined the $1 trillion club, going from $500 billion to $1 trillion in only 48 trading days - the fastest jump on record.
Its stock is up more than 900% over the past 12 months.
Intel, all but left for dead in 2024, is up 211% this year. The turnaround came on the back of a $5 billion Nvidia investment, a US government stake, and an early deal to make chips for Apple devices.
Dell had its biggest single-day gain ever last Friday, jumping 33% on blowout AI server numbers. That move pushed its market cap $125 billion above its March 2000 peak.
Lenovo, the largest PC maker in the world, doubled in May alone - its best month in over 25 years. The driver: AI products and services now make up nearly 40% of its sales.
What To Watch
Nokia and Cisco round out the group. Cisco - briefly the world's most valuable company in 2000 - is up 56% this year and finally back above its dot-com peak.
Nokia, in contrast, is up 124% but still trades nearly 80% below its all-time high.
The pattern across all seven is the same: the stocks investors stopped watching are where the AI money is going now.
The next earnings cycle will show whether the hardware shortage is getting better. Either way, capacity that took years to shrink doesn't come back in a quarter.
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