By Matt Phillips
Publication Date: 2025-12-11 16:15:00
Cisco hit a new closing high on Wednesday, and in doing so finally surpassed the dot-com era peak that briefly made the tech hardware company the world’s most valuable corporation a quarter century ago.
Even after Thursday’s retreat, Cisco is up more than 30% for the year. Shares are on track for their second-best annual gain of the last 15 years, thanks in part to the company’s efforts to boost its profile in the AI data center boom.
(It has recently announced new products such as an optimized data center switches developed in partnership with Nvidia, and plans to take part in a data center joint venture with AMD and Saudi Arabia’s state-backed AI firm, Humain.)
And in a sense, 25-year round-trip journey for the share price tidily links two eras of technological and market ebullience.
A quarter century ago, Cisco was arguably the central player in an investment binge on a then new technology — the internet — that most thought was certain to remake the entire the US…
