🔙 Market’s ’90s flashback

Companies known for their dot-com glory days have been on fire, and they’ve taken a run even higher lately.

Intel. Dell. Western Digital. Sandisk. Some of the old tech names that helped define the stock market mania of the 1990s are among the market’s top performers this year, blowing past decades-old market milestones thanks to the AI investment boom.

• Micron’s April gain of more than 50% was its best showing since February 2000, right before the dot-com market’s peak. Western Digital’s 60% run in April was its best performance since right after the dot-com market rolled over in January 2001.

• Dell, a ubiquitous brand of early internet-era PCs and laptops, is up more than 60% this year, including 27% in April. 

• A range of lesser-known internet-era darlings — Lam Research, Jabil Circuit, Ciena Corp., and ON Semiconductor — are also clustered near the top of the S&P 500’s list of best performers in 2026.

It wasn’t easy for these early internet icons to thrive two decades into the new millennium. 

• Sandisk, which is up nearly 300% in 2026, is now primarily a supplier of large storage systems for data centers, rather than a producer of memory chips consumers can use in digital cameras and music players. 

• Intel restructured its struggling manufacturing operations into a contract chipmaking unit in 2021, a decision that produced billions of dollars in losses, but left it with the valuable ability to ramp up some production to meet surging AI-related demand today. 

• Dell transformed itself via acquisitions, from a maker of affordable computers for companies and corporations into a data networking, software AI server giant.

Analysts now expect sales growth for business software giant Oracle — a 1990s beast — to eclipse the 37% and 35% high-water marks of 1996 and 1997, as a result of expectations about its AI data center business.

The Takeaway

The resurgence of such stocks is a fairly straightforward reflection of what’s going on in the US economy, as the rising tide of IT spending is lifting even companies that have struggled for decades to recapture their past glory. Tech investment as a share of GDP is reaching record levels, surpassing the 4.5% peak set in 2000. That means we’re in the biggest spending spree on computer equipment and software since America was first getting wired up for the web.

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• Crypto’s high hopes for May: Following an April where bitcoin saw its best monthly performance in a year (even as the DeFi ecosystem overall suffered the most attacks in a month ever), fans of digital assets are hoping May can continue the momentum and bitcoin can manage a sustained break above $80,000. Here’s what analysts and experts Sherwood News spoke to see ahead, and what headwinds and catalysts to watch for.  

• Apple actually does fall far from the tree… One of the big stories of the past year has been just how much Big Tech is spending on capex to support its AI ambitions — but not Apple. The iPhone maker has barely dipped a toe in the AI race, preferring to partner rather than create its own frontier models. And while Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, and Microsoft are all spending increasingly vast sums every year on capex, Apple’s has gone the other direction.

Last year, Elon Musk’s companies spent $600 million doing business with… other Elon Musk-led companies: xAI spent $430 million on Megapacks (giant rechargeable battery systems) from Tesla. SpaceX spent $143 million on Tesla vehicles. And Tesla shelled out $4.8 million for security services to Musk’s personal security company. 

Follow the money

• 🎵 Music: May is set for some exciting new music, and prediction markets* are pricing in a 60% chance that Ariana Grande will have a song reach the top of Spotify’s charts in the month, a 44% chance Taylor Swift will have a song go to No. 1, and a 19% chance that Lana Del Rey does. 

• ⛽ Gasoline: Markets are pricing in a 49% chance that gasoline hits $4.60 a gallon in May, not to mention a 32% chance that it rises above $5 by the end of the month. Analysts are already fretting about what the price of gas might look like when the ramifications of the blockage of the Strait of Hormuz hit the US, believing that not only is $5 gas by Memorial Day possible, but $6 per gallon by the end of the summer is on the table.

*Event contracts are offered through Robinhood Derivatives, LLC — probabilities referenced or sourced from KalshiEx LLC or ForecastEx LLC.