IBM после провального квартала: ИИ временно ударил по продажам мейнфреймов

IBM explained the crash of its own shares in mid-July 2026: the company warned investors about weak mainframe sales, and its CEO linked the shortfall to the fact that corporations had temporarily redirected IT budgets toward artificial intelligence infrastructure.

Why IBM's shares collapsed

IBM shares plunged sharply during the week of July 14, 2026 — after the company issued a weak forecast for mainframe sales, the IBM Z server line that underpins a significant share of its hardware revenue. The market's reaction was harsh: investors read weakness in IBM's core segment as a warning sign and sold off the stock.

Mainframes are large corporate servers that banks, insurance companies, and government agencies still run on today: transaction processing, mission-critical databases, real-time calculations. Sales of this hardware were traditionally considered stable, so the warning caught the market off guard.

• Share collapse — mid-July 2026
• Cause — weak mainframe sales forecast (IBM Z line)
• IBM's explanation — temporary reallocation of budgets toward AI
• Company's position — the effect is short-term, not structural

What does artificial intelligence have to do with it

IBM explains the drop in hardware sales by saying businesses have temporarily thrown money at AI infrastructure at the expense of upgrading classic servers. By the company's logic, corporations' constrained IT budgets in 2026 are flowing into GPUs, data centers, and AI platforms, while mainframe purchases and upgrades get pushed back.

AI has temporarily reshuffled corporate capital budgets toward

"hardware" — that's how IBM explains the drop in mainframe sales in the reporting quarter.

The key word in the explanation from IBM CEO Arvind Krishna is "temporarily." The company insists this is not a structural shift but a pause: once the wave of initial AI investments subsides, demand for mainframes will return.

Is AI killing mainframes

IBM says no: artificial intelligence isn't killing mainframes, it's merely pulling budgets toward itself in the moment. The company frames the weak quarter as a temporary demand disruption, not the start of the decline of an entire class of corporate hardware.

IBM itself is building AI directly into mainframes: the Telum processors in the IBM Z line carry built-in accelerators for AI inference. This reinforces the company's argument — for IBM, AI isn't a competitor to mainframes but their continuation, and eventually it should be AI workloads themselves that bring demand for big servers back.

Skeptics read the situation differently: if enterprises prefer to invest in AI infrastructure instead of upgrading mainframes, this could be the start of a longer-term shift in IT spending. For now IBM is sticking with its short-term version of events, but it's precisely the gap between these two interpretations that has split opinion on the stock.

What this means

The wave of AI spending is reshaping corporate IT budgets in real time: even stable segments like mainframes are feeling money flow toward GPUs and data centers. Whether IBM is right about the "temporary" nature of this effect will be shown by the coming quarters of earnings reports.