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Cisco hit a level on Wednesday that it has not touched since the wild days of early 2000, when the company was the center of the internet boom.
The stock surged 1% higher to $80.25, breaking its old split-adjusted record of $80.06, last seen on March 27, 2000, which was also the day the company briefly passed Microsoft to become the most valuable public firm in the world. That moment marked peak internet mania.
Every investor who wanted exposure to the rise of the web looked to its switches and routers. Anyone who wanted to get online needed those tools. Things changed fast after that, and the dot-com bubble blew apart, taking more than three-quarters of the Nasdaq’s value by October 2002.
The collapse wiped out a long list of high-flying names, but Cisco stayed alive through the chaos, and kept building and pulled itself into a different lane. It bought Scientific-Atlanta in 2006, then moved deeper into software with deals for Webex, AppDynamics, Duo, and Splunk. Each move pushed it into new areas while the earlier hype faded away. The company kept expanding even as the market around it changed.
Cisco moves into AI orders
The stock’s new high gives the company a market cap of $317 billion, placing it in the thirteenth spot among U.S. tech names. That is far below the megacap group that now drives the new wave of tech enthusiasm, especially the AI crowd.
Analysts say the current AI boom looks a lot like the energy of the dot-com era. This time the main winner is Nvidia, whose chips power the big AI models.
These chips sit inside the data centers built by major tech companies. Nvidia now holds a value of $4.5 trillion, roughly fourteen times larger than Cisco.
Even with that gap, Cisco is pushing into the AI build-out. CEO Chuck Robbins said in November that the company booked $1.3 billion in quarterly AI infrastructure orders from large web players. The company posted revenue close to $15 billion, up 7.5% from the previous year.
The growth rate is nowhere near the 66% pace it saw in 2000, but the demand for AI-related hardware has pushed the stock up about 36% so far in 2025. The Nasdaq has gained around 22% in the same period.
UBS analyst David Vogt pointed to AI infrastructure demand when he upgraded Cisco’s stock last month ahead of the fiscal first-quarter earnings report. He said the order flow shows strong interest from companies building AI systems.
But many on Wall Street say they are not sure the current spending frenzy can continue. Some say the sector is burning cash too fast. Others question whether accounting rules are being used the right way as companies pile into AI projects.
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