FLASHBACK
Stocks like Dell, Intel, Sandisk, Western Digital, and Cisco are on fire.
The dot-com dream of the 1990s is thriving in today’s market
Companies known for their dot-com glory days have been on fire, and they’ve taken a run even higher lately.
It’s not just baggy pants that are back.
Intel. Dell. Western Digital. Sandisk. Some of the old tech names that helped define the stock market mania of the 1990s are among the market’s top performers this year, blowing past decades-old market milestones thanks the AI investment boom.
In April, Intel more than doubled its stock price, marking its best monthly performance on record stretching back to 1972. It leapfrogged its all-time high — notched way back in August 2000 — along the way. Networking company Cisco, another dot-com darling, pulled off a similar feat in December.
April was also a boon for aging technology firms like memory chip maker Micron and Western Digital, a maker of unsexy data storage devices known as hard disk drives. Micron’s April gain of more than 50% was its best showing since February 2000, right before the dot-com market’s peak. Western Digital’s 60% run in April was its best performance since right after the dot-com market rolled over in January 2001.
The list goes on. Dell — a ubiquitous brand of early internet-era PCs and laptops — is up more than 60% this year, including 27% in April. And a range of lesser-known internet-era darlings — Lam Research, Jabil Circuit, Ciena Corp., and ON Semiconductor — are clustered near the top of the S&P 500’s list of best performers in 2026.
It’s certainly a throwback moment, but part of these companies’ resurgence is because they’re very different than they were when NSYNC was a budding boy band and “Pokémon” cards were first making waves in the US.
Sandisk, which is up nearly 300% in 2026, is now primarily a supplier of large storage systems for data centers, rather than a producer of memory chips consumers can use in digital cameras and music players. Intel restructured its struggling manufacturing operations into a contract chipmaking unit in 2021, a decision that produced billions of dollars in losses, but left it with the valuable ability to ramp up some production to meet surging AI-related demand today. Dell transformed itself via acquisitions, from a maker of affordable computers for companies and corporations into a data networking, software AI server giant.
The price moves are reminiscent of the ’90s, and so are some of the growth projections. For instance, analysts now expect sales growth for business software giant Oracle — a 1990s beast — to eclipse the 37% and 35% high-water marks of 1996 and 1997, as a result of expectations about its AI data center business.
The resurgence of such stocks is a fairly straightforward reflection of what’s going on in the US economy, as the rising tide of IT spending is lifting even companies that have struggled for decades to recapture their past glory.
And as DA Davidson analyst Gil Luria — something of an Intel skeptic — put it in his note on Intel’s results, it “must be quite a rising tide.”
It is indeed: tech investment as a share of GDP is reaching record levels, surpassing the high-water mark of 4.5% set in 2000. That means we’re in the biggest spending spree on computer equipment and software since America was first getting wired up for the web.
“They’re all benefiting from the AI, and they’ve been a bit later,” Bernstein Research analyst Mark Newman said of some of the ’90s vintage shares such as Intel and Dell that have sprung to life recently.
He says some of the delayed reaction for shares, such as Dell — which makes the servers that fill data centers — reflected investor worry that the AI boom would drive inflation for key inputs into Dell products, like memory chips, and that would hurt profit margins.
“The thing is, that’s not the point. The point is it’s driving huge growth in overall profits,” Newman said of the data center boom. “And I think now that’s becoming more and more obvious.”
In fact, worries about margins related to AI servers have largely been misplaced, Newman said. Price hikes have done little to dissuade buyers of AI-related servers, and companies like Dell can easily pass along whatever increase they’ve eaten on components to data center builders.
“With AI servers there’s no price sensitivity at all,” Newman said. “The customers just take it because there’s no choice.”
After rising more than 200% and 50% between the end of 1997 and their respective peaks in March 2000, the Nasdaq Composite and the S&P 500 plunged roughly 80% and 50%, respectively. (The Nasdaq wouldn’t conclusively clear its March 2000 high until 2015. The S&P first got over the hump in late 2006.)
The pain was as bad, or worse, for high-flying tech stocks of the era. A small online book retailer by the name of Amazon.com fell by more than 90%, and Cisco came close to a 90% loss as well. Intel tumbled 80% over the next few years and only got back to its all-time high last week.
The bust also sent Dell on a journey. The company’s share price plunged from a peak of $57.58 in late March 2000, never return to that level — at least in the company’s old configuration.
More than 13 years later, when Michael Dell took the company private — with the help of private equity firm Silver Lake, he would pay roughly $25 billion for it — the shares would be at $13.73, or about 80% below the dot-com peak.
But when Dell returned to the public markets again in 2018, it was a very different operation, having transformed away from the prying eyes of the public by buying IT infrastructure company EMC in 2016.
The deal further shifted Dell’s business toward data management, cloud computing servers, and security software and away from its traditional bread and butter of PCs and laptops for companies and consumers — a move that, in retrospect, looks pretty shrewd.
