IBM stock just had its worst trading day since October 1987. Shares fell 25% on Tuesday, July 14, after the company warned that second-quarter revenue would miss Wall Street's numbers badly. That's worse than the day after Black Monday, and worse than any single day the exchange has on record for the stock, with data going back to 1968.
Its investor letter pointed to one cause. Enterprise clients are shifting their spending away from IBM's Z mainframes and software, and toward servers, storage, and memory, racing to lock in AI infrastructure before prices climb.
Arvind Krishna, IBM's CEO, added more to the story later that same day, in a live interview with CNBC. He said Anthropic's new Mythos model is making clients pause before they sign cybersecurity deals, because they want to know how much AI is about to change what they actually need. Then he pushed back on the idea that AI is hurting IBM at all.
Damilare Odedina
"We don't see our software being disrupted by AI at all," he told CNBC, on the same day IBM's own software business missed expectations.
Nvidia, AMD, and Intel didn't have IBM's problem. While IBM was posting the worst day of its public trading history, all three climbed the same afternoon. Nvidia rose 3.5%, AMD rose 6%, and Intel rose 4%, riding a broader chip rally on cooling inflation data. IBM lost ground. Chipmakers gained it. And Krishna had just named one reason why, and it wasn't Nvidia.
Why did IBM stock go down?
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