Remember when Cisco was the most valuable company on the planet?
Yeah, neither do most people under 35. But on a quiet Wednesday in December 2025, something remarkable happened that made a generation of tech veterans choke on their coffee: Cisco’s stock closed at $80.25—officially higher than the split-adjusted peak it hit back in March 2000, right at the absolute top of the dot-com bubble.
Twenty-five years. That’s how long it took.
In an industry that reinvents itself every decade, surviving that long at the top tier is already rare. Actually coming back to set a new all-time high after being written off by an entire generation of investors? That’s almost unheard of.
The Fall and Rise Nobody Saw Coming
Let’s be honest—most of us thought Cisco’s best days were behind it.
For years, the narrative was brutal: the king of networking hardware got disrupted by cloud, commoditized by white-box switches, and left behind while hyperscalers built their own gear. The stock drifted sideways for pretty much the entire 2010s while FAANG names went parabolic.
But something changed in the last couple of years. And no, it’s not that the world suddenly decided it loves buying routers again the old-fashioned way.
It’s artificial intelligence.
Why AI Needs Cisco More Than Ever
Here’s the part that still blows my mind: the biggest AI builds on the planet—the ones sucking down hundreds of thousands of Nvidia GPUs—need insane amounts of networking.
We’re talking 800-gigabit ports, massive spine-leaf architectures, and low-latency fabrics that can move petabytes between servers without breaking a sweat. And guess who spent the last thirty years perfecting exactly that?
Cisco didn’t have to invent this market from scratch. They were already there.
When the largest cloud providers started placing orders for AI backend infrastructure, they weren’t just buying GPUs. They were buying the plumbing that makes those GPUs actually talk to each other at scale. And a lot of those orders—$1.3 billion worth last quarter alone—went to San Jose.
The demand we’re seeing from the hyperscalers for AI infrastructure is accelerating, not slowing down.
– CEO Chuck Robbins, November 2025
Same Company, Completely Different Business
People miss this part: today’s Cisco barely resembles the 2000 version.
Back then, they were almost purely a hardware company riding the internet build-out wave. Today? The transformation has been radical:
- Recurring revenue now over 50% of the total (up from basically zero in 2000)
- Splunk acquisition added a massive security and observability software business
- Webex became a legitimate Zoom competitor during the pandemic
- ThousandEyes gives them visibility into internet health that nobody else has
- AppDynamics and Duo rounded out the security portfolio
They didn’t just survive the cloud transition—they used it to become a different animal entirely.
In my view, this is one of the most underappreciated corporate transformations in tech history. Most companies that dominated their era in the 90s either died (Sun Microsystems) or became irrelevant (hello, Intel). Cisco somehow threaded the needle.
The Nvidia Comparison Everyone Makes (And Why It’s Missing the Point)
Yes, Nvidia’s market cap is now 14 times bigger than Cisco’s. Yes, that’s wild.
But comparing them directly is like comparing a gold mine to the company that makes the picks and shovels. Different games.
Nvidia sells the processors. Cisco sells the networking that connects 100,000 of those processors together into something useful. Every major AI training cluster on Earth needs both. They’re complementary, not competitors.
Actually, Nvidia’s success is part of what’s driving Cisco’s resurgence. The bigger the AI clusters get, the more critical (and expensive) the networking becomes.
What the New High Actually Means
Closing above the 2000 peak does something psychological to investors.
For decades, that $80.06 level from March 27, 2000, hung over the stock like a curse. Every time it approached that level, sellers would appear—people who bought at the top finally getting even, funds with ancient cost basis taking profits, whatever.
Now that resistance is gone.
From a technical perspective, Cisco is in open air. The next meaningful resistance levels are psychological round numbers—$100 feels inevitable at this point, and analysts are already floating $120+ targets if AI orders keep accelerating.
The Numbers Tell the Story
Let’s look at some context that makes this move even more impressive:
- 2025 year-to-date performance: up ~36% (vs Nasdaq +22%)
- Market cap: $317 billion (13th largest US tech company)
- Forward P/E: ~16x (reasonable for this growth profile)
- Dividend yield: ~3.2% (and growing)
- Free cash flow: absolutely massive
This isn’t some speculative AI play trading at 100x sales. This is a mature tech giant that’s suddenly growing again—and still reasonably valued.
Where Do We Go From Here?
The million-dollar question (or in this case, the $100-billion question).
The bull case is straightforward: AI infrastructure build-out is still in early innings. The largest cloud providers have barely started deploying their next-generation clusters. If Cisco keeps capturing even a portion of that spend, the growth could continue for years.
The bear case? Well, hyperscalers could eventually build more of this stuff themselves. Competition from Arista, Juniper, and others remains fierce. And if the AI bubble cools dramatically, infrastructure spending would feel it.
But here’s what I find interesting: even if AI spending slows, Cisco’s base business is actually pretty healthy now. The shift to subscription, the software acquisitions, the recurring revenue—all of that provides a much higher floor than the 2000 version ever had.
This time really is different.
The companies that survive multiple technology waves are incredibly rare. Cisco might just be the ultimate survivor in tech.
Twenty-five years ago, Cisco hit a peak and then spent a quarter-century in the wilderness. Today, they’re hitting a new peak with a completely different business model, in a completely different technological era.
That’s not just a stock market milestone. That’s one of the great corporate comeback stories in technology history.
And honestly? I wouldn’t bet against them writing the next chapter.
