How the AI Boom Gave 1990s Tech Brands a Second Youth

The AI boom has handed 1990s tech brands a second youth. In May, Dell more than doubled, Hewlett Packard Enterprise climbed roughly 50%, Cisco Systems rose 32% and Micron added 88%, as the infrastructure names that defined the dot-com era cashed in on a surge of artificial intelligence (AI, the machine-learning systems now driving record data-center spending) demand.

The orders underneath are real this time, booked and under contract. What rhymes with history is the speed of the re-rating, because the last time this same cohort traded as growth stocks, the run ended in an 80% crash and, for Cisco, a wait of more than two decades to get back to even.

The Month Old IT Ran the S&P 500

For one month, the oldest names on the board behaved like the youngest. The information technology sector rose 16% in May, and the leaders were brands a parent might have bought a beige desktop from. Dell Technologies finished as the top-performing stock in the S&P 500, more than doubling over the month, including a 32% single-session jump on May 29 that was its best day on record. The Financial Times’s Lex column called the moment a second crack at youth, and the tape agreed.

The gains weren’t confined to one company. Memory maker Micron Technology jumped 88%, storage firm SanDisk rose 55%, and Cisco, the networking giant whose plumbing carried the first internet boom, added 32%. Here is how the cohort’s month looked against the AI catalyst behind each move.

These are not speculative startups. They are the survivors and successors of the companies that wired the late-1990s internet, and for years they traded like utilities. In May they traded like the future.

The Orders Behind the Rally Are Under Contract

What separates this rally from the last is paperwork. The bookings these companies are reporting are signed, multi-year, and large enough to reshape full-year forecasts in a single quarter. That is the load-bearing difference from 1999, when valuations rested on web traffic and the promise of profits that mostly never arrived.

Dell’s $24.4 Billion Order Book

Dell reported first-quarter fiscal 2027 revenue of $43.8 billion on May 28, up 88% from a year earlier, with diluted earnings per share (EPS, profit divided by shares outstanding) of $5.24, up 282%. The standout figure was the AI line. The company booked $24.4 billion in AI orders in the quarter and recognized $16.1 billion of AI server revenue, a 757% jump, and lifted its full-year forecast for AI-optimized server revenue to roughly $60 billion in its first-quarter fiscal 2027 results, up about 144% on the prior year.

Cisco and HPE Pile Up Hyperscaler Bookings

Cisco’s third quarter brought record revenue of $15.8 billion, up 12%. It took $1.9 billion in AI infrastructure orders from hyperscalers in the quarter and $5.3 billion across the first three quarters, enough to push its full-year hyperscaler order target to $9 billion, nearly double the $5 billion it guided earlier. Chuck Robbins, Cisco’s chief executive, told investors the company’s “technology is more relevant than ever in the AI era,” the kind of line that would have sounded like marketing a year ago and now matches the order log. HPE’s most recent quarter showed an AI systems backlog of $6.3 billion and networking revenue up 148%.

Oracle’s $553 Billion Promise

Oracle’s backlog tells the same story at a different scale. The database company’s remaining performance obligations (RPO, the value of signed contracts not yet booked as revenue) reached $553 billion at the end of its third quarter, up 325% from a year earlier, most of it large-scale AI contracts. Total revenue rose 22% and cloud sales 44%. Oracle said the equipment for those deals is largely funded upfront, either through customer prepayments or hardware the customer supplies, which keeps the contracts from draining its own balance sheet.

Cisco’s 25-Year Round Trip Back to Even

To see why the speed matters, look at what happened the last time this group was treated as young. Cisco’s stock peaked at $80.06 on March 27, 2000, when it briefly became the world’s most valuable company at more than $500 billion and carried a price-to-earnings (P/E, share price divided by annual profit per share) multiple of 472. Then the floor fell out.

The Nasdaq Composite, which had risen roughly 600% from 1995 to its March 2000 high, dropped 78% by October 2002. Blue-chip names including Cisco, Intel and Oracle lost more than 80% of their value. Wall Street’s old joke about the era’s “Four Horsemen,” Cisco, Intel, Dell and Microsoft, stopped being funny fast.

• 472 Cisco’s peak price-to-earnings ratio in 1999
• 78% the Nasdaq’s fall from its March 2000 high to October 2002
• 25 years roughly the time Cisco needed to top its dot-com peak, which it finally did in December 2025

That recovery, charted against today’s enthusiasm, is the warning a chart of May’s gains can’t show on its own. Gallagher’s research note on tech-stock mania then and now lays out how long the round trip took and how much faith investors lost on the way down.

Which Old-Guard Names Are Winning the AI Buildout?

The label “1990s revival” flattens real differences. Some of these companies sell commodity boxes at thin margins; others own franchises the AI buildout can’t easily route around. And one of the era’s biggest names is barely at the party.

• Dell and HPE sell the servers, and they sell a lot of them, but AI hardware carries slimmer margins than the software and services the market prizes. HPE’s revenue rose 40% to $10.7 billion in its latest quarter, with networking up 148%.
• Cisco sits closer to the high-margin end on switching and custom silicon, yet it cut about 4,000 jobs alongside its record quarter, a sign management is squeezing costs even as orders pour in.
• Oracle is converting decades of database lock-in into AI cloud capacity, though the contracts behind its third-quarter backlog demand heavy upfront spending on chips.
• IBM is the laggard. Its first-quarter 2026 revenue rose 9% to $15.92 billion with software up 11%, solid numbers, yet its shares trailed the cohort and sat down for the year while the others soared.

So the revival is uneven. The names with pricing power and the names simply moving volume have been bid up together, which is exactly the kind of broad-brush enthusiasm that tends to sort itself out painfully later.

What the Re-Rating Is Pricing In

The market is paying up for an order book that depends on a small group of customers continuing to spend at an extraordinary rate. That dependency is the part of the story the share prices haven’t stress-tested.

Thin Margins on the Hardware

AI servers move enormous revenue at modest profit. Dell’s top line jumped 88%, yet the most expensive components inside, the accelerators it resells, leave little room on each box. Volume drives the headlines while margins stay tight, which is why even a booming Cisco trimmed headcount in the same breath as it reported a record.

One Capex Cycle Holds It Up

Most of these orders trace to the same well: hyperscaler and large-enterprise spending on AI data centers. Cisco’s $9 billion order target leans on a handful of cloud giants. HPE has said about 61% of its AI backlog comes from government and large-enterprise customers. If that capital spending normalizes, the booked backlog now justifying these valuations thins fast.

There is one genuine comfort in the comparison to 2000. The average P/E of the five biggest tech stocks in 1999 ran more than twice today’s level for the equivalent group, so the same enthusiasm is attached to cheaper earnings. These companies also generate real cash, which most dot-com darlings never did.

The orders are signed and the cash flow is real, which the class of 2000 could rarely claim. What none of these share prices has tested is the year the data-center spending that revived them finally slows.

Disclaimer: This article is for informational purposes only and is not investment advice. Technology equities, including the companies named here, carry significant market and valuation risk, and past performance does not guarantee future results. Consult a qualified financial professional before making investment decisions. Figures are accurate as of publication.