Old-school hardware firms are dominating the S&P 500 in 2025, and it’s not the companies anyone expected. Seagate, Western Digital, and Micron—all born before smartphones were even a thing—are suddenly Wall Street’s favorite bets.
Seagate’s up 156% this year. Western Digital has gained 137%. Micron’s jumped 93% after logging twelve straight days of wins. The reason? Not AI headlines, but the cold, boring reality behind them: all that artificial intelligence hype needs physical infrastructure to exist.
According to data from Bloomberg, investors have shifted fast into these names, betting on demand for hardware as Big Tech pours cash into building AI systems.
What’s fueling this? Three years after ChatGPT kicked off the AI craze, giants like Microsoft and Alphabet are still shoveling tens of billions into chips, data centers, power, and networking gear to train and run their AI models.
This has turned Nvidia and TSMC into trillion-dollar monsters. But now, the cash is flowing into more basic tech like hard drives and memory chips. Seagate and Western Digital make those clunky old things that used to weigh more than your car. Now they’re essential for training massive language models that need mountains of data to even start working.
Wall Street floods cash into hardware stocks
Seagate’s hard drives—yes, those—go back to the 1950s, when five megabytes needed 2,000 pounds of metal. Today, two terabytes fit in your palm. That’s the kind of storage AI eats daily. Western Digital is riding the same wave.
Then there’s Micron. The Idaho-based memory chipmaker’s DRAM products are now a backbone for AI computing. But retail investors aren’t exactly drooling. “I can hear people’s eyes glaze over when I talk about them on the phone,” said Kim Forrest, founder of Bokeh Capital Partners, who owns Micron. “They want to talk about flying cars and dog robots.”
Kim thinks the tech boom is over-hyped. She’s been managing money for twenty years and used to work in software. Now, she sees AI’s real-world adoption playing out way slower than headlines suggest. “If you’re buying things that are specifically for AI or for data centers, anything that is on that straight-line trajectory is a cautionary tale waiting to happen,” she said.
Micron’s not the only sleeper getting love. Vistra, an electricity provider, is up 53% this year after surging 258% in 2024 and 66% the year before. Broadcom has hit a $1.6 trillion valuation after stacking 49% gains in 2025 and doubling in both 2024 and 2023.
Sandisk, another memory firm, has exploded by more than 100% since September 2. Oracle, better known for its slow, outdated database software, shot up 36% after earnings on September 9, putting it in the S&P 500’s top 10.
Valuations climb while analysts scramble to keep up
Despite this surge, Seagate, Western Digital, and Micron are still some of the cheapest stocks on the index. All three have made a profit this year, but each posted annual GAAP losses within the past three.
At the start of 2025, Western Digital traded at less than six times expected earnings. Seagate and Micron hovered around ten times. Even now, all three are below the S&P 500’s 23x forward earnings multiple.
Seagate is the priciest of the three, sitting at 20x, but Mark Miller, analyst at Benchmark Co., just raised his price target to $250, above Friday’s close of $221. “We see higher Seagate HDD prices and margins, which argue for the expansion from historic multiples,” he wrote last week.
Looking at revenue, Seagate is expected to grow 16% in fiscal 2026, down from 39% in 2025. Western Digital’s sales, which fell 27% last year, are also forecasted to rebound 16%.
Micron leads the pack with 48% growth this year and another 33% next. But the rally has moved faster than Wall Street’s models. Seagate is already trading 20% above its average target. Western Digital’s 10% over. Micron’s slightly ahead too.
Michael from Jonestrading doesn’t think this is the time to jump in. “Historically with any cyclical business, usually they peak at a low multiple and they trough when they have negative earnings,” he said. “So the time to buy it is when the cycle has reversed and they’re losing money, and the time to sell it is when the multiple looks healthy.”
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Source: https://www.cryptopolitan.com/old-school-tech-stocks-lead-sp-500-ai-demand/
