Tashkent, Uzbekistan – AN Podrobno.uz. Seven iconic IT companies from the early internet era of the 1990s are experiencing a renaissance thanks to unprecedented spending on artificial intelligence infrastructure. Dell Technologies, Nokia, Lenovo Group, Micron Technology, Intel, Texas Instruments, and Cisco Systems saw their stocks surge an average of 158% in 2026, adding a combined $1.7 trillion to their market capitalization.
Soaring demand for servers, networking equipment, data storage components, and memory chips, driven by the expansion of AI clusters, has broadened the rally far beyond the current darlings of the stock market. This trend is clearly illustrated in a chart showing the synchronous rise in stock prices since the beginning of the year.
The hardware and semiconductor sector posted the most impressive results. Dell shares jumped 33% in a single trading day in late May after reporting record demand for AI servers, pushing the company's market cap $125 billion above its historical peak in 2000.
Memory chip maker Micron Technology joined the elite club of companies with a market cap exceeding $1 trillion, with its shares skyrocketing 903% over the past 12 months due to a shortage of high-speed RAM. Intel securities rose 211% in 2026 amid massive sales forecasts, a chip manufacturing partnership with Apple, and investments from Nvidia. Texas Instruments shares gained 76% as AI servers require higher energy density.
In the PC and telecom sector, China's Lenovo saw its shares rise 159% this year, becoming the best performer in the Hang Seng Index in May after entering the AI product market. Finland's Nokia, which shifted focus to networking equipment and acquired US-based Infinera in 2025, grew over 124%. Networking giant Cisco posted a 56% gain, beating forecasts by pivoting to AI infrastructure and returning to its record price levels of 2000.
According to Bloomberg, the massive AI rally is expanding as the market faces an acute shortage of basic hardware components, whose production capacity has barely increased in previous years. Experts polled by Bloomberg note that the current situation proves that companies long considered "dinosaurs" of the IT industry have found a second wind and transformed into new locomotives of the AI era.
Source: podrobno.uz