Cisco CSCO 0.00%↑ was nearly destroyed by the first tech bubble. It spent two decades recovering. Now it has posted its biggest post-earnings jump since 2002 — and the catalyst is the same theme that wiped it out 25 years ago. This time, the revenue is real.
📈 Largest post-earnings jump since 2002: A beat-and-raise quarter with Q4 guidance topping Street estimates by nearly $1 billion
🤖 AI orders nearly doubled: Hyperscaler AI order forecast raised from $5 billion to $9 billion for the next fiscal year in a single quarter
✂️ Workforce reset: Approximately 4,000 jobs cut as Cisco reallocates resources toward AI networking infrastructure
💡 Stack position: Cisco provides the network switching and routing layer inside hyperscaler data centers — the pipes connecting every GPU cluster to every other GPU cluster
In the dot-com era, Cisco was selling infrastructure into a demand wave with no revenue behind it — startup money funding a vision. Today’s hyperscalers — Microsoft Alphabet, Amazon — are generating enormous cash flows and booking Cisco equipment as a cost of expanding those cash flows. Different buyer quality entirely.
What’s notable about the AI order revision is the pace. Going from $5 billion to $9 billion in a single quarter is a step-change in how hyperscalers think about network capacity. Every GPU cluster needs connectivity. As cluster sizes scale toward larger and larger training runs, network density requirements scale with them. Cisco sat in the right place at the right time, but it also spent years quietly repositioning toward this moment. The company that almost died on this exact trade 25 years ago is now the picks-and-shovels beneficiary of the same infrastructure impulse.
Related Stocks: $CSCO, $MSFT, $GOOGL, $AMZN, $NVDA, $META, $AVGO, $ANET, $DELL, $HPE
Improving financial outcomes by boosting financial literacy.
If you enjoyed this newsletter…
Refer a friend.
Or a family member—or even a stranger—as long as they open up our emails and keep us out of their spam folder.
But wait! There’s more…
Give your friend (or relative) the gift of a premium subscription—even just for one month—and we’ll comp your subscription for 6 months.
YES, you can game the system!
How to game the system:
Click the link above, pay for one month to a new subscriber’s email
Cancel within 30 days
Seven months for the price of one: you get 6 months, your friend gets 1.
And if you refer two friends: you get a whole year free.
Of course, we would prefer you not cancel right away… so instead, tell your friend to game the system too.
Pay it forward and we all win
One free subscriber turns into 3 premium subscribers—with a total of 14 premium months between the three of you.
That’s an 85% discount to the best newsletter user experience in investing.