Cisco's $80.06 Lesson: 25 Years From Peak to New High as AI Order Book Swells

Cisco Systems closed at $80.06 on March 27, 2000, and buyers who paid that price waited 25 years, eight months and 13 days for a higher close. The Financial Times, summarized by Slashdot, clocked the full round trip to the new closing high of $80.25 set on Dec. 10, 2025, per Bloomberg via Insider Monkey. Sherwood News reporter Matt Phillips pegged the dot-com closing high at $80.06 and documented the quarter-century wait.

That single trading day still shadows the company, even as Cisco rides a fresh wave of AI networking orders through 2026. At the close on March 27, 2000, the Associated Press reported, Cisco held a market value of $555.5 billion on basic shares — enough to edge past Microsoft at $541.6 billion and make Cisco the world's most valuable company.

How Cisco got priced for perfection

Cisco sold the picks and shovels of the internet boom. Its routers and switches carried dot-com traffic, and Phillips reported the stock vaulted roughly 4,000% from the end of 1994 to March 2000. By the peak, investors were paying in advance for decades of perfect growth: per the Financial Times via Slashdot, Cisco traded above 200 times earnings and at 31 times sales on an enterprise-value basis.

What did the collapse cost?

When the Nasdaq Composite came apart, Cisco went down with it. From the March 27, 2000 close to Oct. 11, 2002, the shares fell 87.11%, with MarketBeat putting the low at $10.32 that October day. A buyer at the bottom needed a 676.3% gain just to get back to the peak close. Bloomberg, via Insider Monkey, reported Cisco lost roughly 90% of its market value and sank to around $60 billion in late 2002.

Getting back took a generation, and the flat share price hides a business that kept compounding. The FT, via Slashdot, wrote that "revenues have nearly quintupled since 1999, profits have quadrupled, earnings per share have grown eightfold, and margins have remained healthy throughout." The March 2000 price had simply counted most of that success before it happened.

Shareholders who held also collected what peak-era buyers never got: Cisco paid no dividend until its first quarterly payout of $0.06 a share on April 20, 2011, per the company. Buybacks skew the picture too. Because Cisco retired so many shares, Phillips noted, its market value at the December 2025 high sat roughly $250 billion below its 2000 top. And per the FT via Slashdot, peak buyers still lost money to inflation for a generation.

Can the AI supercycle rewrite the story?

Today Cisco supplies AI infrastructure directly. Fiscal 2026 revenue reached $63.3 billion, with AI infrastructure orders from hyperscalers hitting $9.3 billion, according to Cisco's release. The company expects $7.5 billion of AI infrastructure revenue in fiscal 2027. Chair and CEO Chuck Robbins said Cisco is "well-positioned as the critical infrastructure for the AI era, building on our technology leadership and customer trust, while innovating at the speed and scale that our dynamic world demands."

Per Fortune, the stock hit an intraday record of $119.36 on May 14, 2026. It traded at $94.89 on Friday morning — up 25.43% for the year but down 12.62% over the past week — with a market value near $373.4 billion, still well below the AP's March 2000 figure. Cisco is expected to report again on Nov. 12, a date the company has not confirmed.

Is Nvidia the new Cisco?

The FT, via Slashdot, wrote that "Cisco's trajectory draws obvious comparisons to Nvidia, today's dominant 'picks and shovels' supplier for the AI boom." Nvidia's market value sits near $4.556 trillion, and its fiscal second-quarter revenue rose 105.85% year over year to $96.22 billion. But it trades at roughly 37 times earnings, far below the 200-plus multiple Cisco carried at its peak — and its shares have fallen 21.14% over the past month. Nvidia has also taken on $279.0 billion in supply commitments, mostly for memory tied to its Vera Rubin ramp, and reports fiscal third-quarter results on Nov. 17.

Phillips wrote that the Cisco story "shows just how difficult it is" for a company at the center of a boom "to know precisely where one stands." A great company bought at a peak multiple can deliver poor returns for decades, and with a few AI giants carrying outsized weight in the S&P 500 and the index funds tracking it, the multiple investors pay for AI growth now matters as much as the growth itself.