Catenaa, Saturday, May 30, 2026- Dell, Nokia, and Lenovo, the stars of the dot-com era has rose to the forefront of tech stocks as AI spending booms.
A rush to build out AI infrastructure has led to soaring demand for everything from computer servers to storage components, networking gear, and even legacy chips.
That’s resulted in a frenetic rally in stocks around the world with any sort of exposure to those areas.
The latest surge has swept up iconic tech names from the 1990s, including many of the so-called “Four Horsemen”, a group considered the equivalent of the Magnificent Seven cohort during that era.
In addition to Dell, Nokia, and Lenovo, high fliers from the dot-com days that have caught fire again this year include Micron Technology, Intel, Texas Instruments, and Cisco Systems.
In total, the seven stocks have soared an average of 158% in 2026, adding a combined $1.7 trillion in market value.
From clunky mobile phone makers to a reinvented calculator chip producer, here are some of the retro tech stocks that are staging a roaring comeback:
Shares of Dell soared 33% on Friday, their biggest one-day gain ever, after the hardware maker, best known for its personal computer business, reported earnings that showed surging demand for its AI servers.
The rally may harken back to Dell’s heyday when the stock soared more than 200% for three consecutive years in the late 1990s.
But after the company lost more than 80% of its value in the wake of the dot-com bust, it was taken private in 2013. Dell returned to public markets in late 2018 and is now worth $125 billion, more than its peak valuation of $148 billion in March 2000.
Lenovo Group announced itself on the global stage with the acquisition of International Business Machines’s personal computing division in 2005, gaining rights to the iconic ThinkPad line of business notebooks and providing a foundation to eventually become the largest PC maker in the world.
While the PC industry has been in secular decline for years, Lenovo’s push into AI products and services has helped the Chinese computer hardware company generate revenue growth of 20% over the last year, with nearly 40% of its total sales now coming from those businesses.
Lenovo shares gained 105% in May to hit a record high and mint their best month in more than a quarter-century.
Its shares are the top performer on Hong Kong’s benchmark Hang Seng Index this year, up 159%, delivering investors more than three times the return of the next best stock.
Nokia suffered back-to-back setbacks in the 2000s: first, a telecommunication boom that turned into a bust, and then its handset business was disrupted by the rise of smartphones.
From a peak market value of $349 billion, the stock fell as much as 98% through 2012.
After selling its mobile phone business to Microsoft in 2014, Nokia rebuilt itself around the less glamorous business of telecommunications networking gear.
Its latest revival has been helped by its 2025 purchase of Infinera, a US optical-networking specialist, just as AI data centers were boosting demand for faster links between computing clusters.
Shares of the Finnish company have surged more than 124% this year, making it the fourth-best performer in the Stoxx Europe 600. Still, the stock has yet to retest its highs of the dot-com era and remains nearly 80% below its record close.
