IBM (IBM) on Solana

IBM shares fell 25.2% to $217 on July 14, the worst single-day decline in the company's 115-year history, surpassing the 23% drop suffered during the October 1987 Black Monday crash. The sell-off erased roughly $67 billion in market capitalization, leaving IBM valued at just under $205 billion. The drop followed a preliminary second-quarter report warning that results fell short of expectations, with adjusted earnings of $2.93 per share on revenue of $17.2 billion — below analyst forecasts of $3.01 EPS and $17.86 billion in revenue.

CEO Arvind Krishna said the company "did not adapt and move quickly enough," attributing the miss to customers redirecting spending away from software toward AI-related hardware — servers, storage, and memory chips — driven by supply constraints and anticipated price increases. IBM also cited industry-wide cybersecurity concerns and multiple large deals that slipped their expected close dates. The company is scheduled to report full Q2 results on July 22. The selloff rippled across the software sector, with Salesforce falling 4% and Microsoft dropping nearly 3% on the day.

Jim Cramer is reiterating his buy call on IBM, framing the stock as a way to gain technology exposure outside the data-center spending cycle. "People who might want tech, without the cauldron of the data centers, should be looking at IBM," he said, pointing to the company's quantum computing capabilities and software business as the main investment thesis. IBM shares are up roughly 1.3% over the past year but flat year-to-date, and Cramer notes the stock trades at approximately 22 times next year's earnings — a valuation he considers attractive given the recent post-earnings pullback. Bank of America recently raised both its price target and earnings estimates for the company.

Green Alpha Investments separately highlighted IBM's quantum-centric supercomputing architecture — which combines quantum processors with GPUs and CPUs — alongside its hybrid cloud platform anchored by Red Hat OpenShift. The firm noted IBM's $11 billion Confluent acquisition and expanded partnerships with NVIDIA and ARM as additional factors strengthening its AI infrastructure positioning among major clients in financial services, telecommunications, and healthcare.

Susquehanna initiated coverage of IBM on July 10, 2026 with a Neutral rating and a $303 price target, sending shares down roughly 1.5%. Despite acknowledging IBM's strong AI momentum — Watsonx bookings exceeding $12.5 billion, approximately $15.7 billion in annual free cash flow, and a supportive z17 mainframe cycle — the firm stopped short of a bullish stance, pointing to two structural concerns: pressure on IBM's consulting segment from increased automation and excess industry capacity, and a valuation the analyst described as trading at roughly 9x its historical premium and about 3x the broader S&P 500 multiple following a 25% gain in Q2.

Susquehanna also flagged quantum computing as a potential long-term catalyst but noted that "commercial adoption is still developing and future demand is difficult to forecast," dampening the upside case. The neutral stance effectively capped enthusiasm from investors who had priced in broader analyst endorsement alongside the strong AI bookings narrative, illustrating that elevated valuations leave little margin for anything short of an outright buy recommendation.

IBM, Deloitte, and Red Hat announced a strategic collaboration on June 26, 2026 centered on Lightwell, a secure software supply chain platform designed to protect enterprises from automated cyberattacks. Lightwell lets organizations create, test, and distribute verified security patches directly to production software without requiring disruptive system upgrades — addressing a growing category of AI-linked vulnerabilities targeting open-source components at large-scale enterprises.

Deloitte acts as the integration partner, expanding the initiative across client organizations through its cybersecurity risk management services, while IBM and Red Hat contribute open-source security models and engineering expertise. IBM VP of Service Partners Savio Rodrigues described the solution as bringing together "the engineering, automation, and ecosystem partnerships needed to tackle this risk at scale." The offering covers machine-speed remediation, contextual prioritization, continuous visibility, and ecosystem compliance — reinforcing IBM's position in enterprise security alongside its expanding AI and hybrid cloud partnerships.

IBM and ServiceNow announced on June 11, 2026 a multi-year expanded collaboration targeting the two most common barriers blocking enterprise AI at scale: fragmented, AI-unready data and deeply entrenched legacy application layers. The partnership integrates IBM's watsonx.data, Red Hat Ansible, Instana, and application modernization tooling with ServiceNow's Workflow Data Fabric and AI Platform, delivering joint solutions across three areas — legacy application refactoring, enterprise data governance, and autonomous infrastructure operations. Solutions are expected to reach customers in the second half of 2026.

For IBM, the deal reinforces its enterprise AI and consulting strategy by embedding IBM watsonx and Red Hat capabilities directly into ServiceNow's widely deployed workflow platform. Rather than ripping out aging infrastructure, the approach modernizes existing systems in place, an argument IBM has consistently made as a differentiator for large-scale deployments. IBM's Raj Datta framed the collaboration as recognizing that AI adoption requires rethinking not just models but the underlying systems, data pipelines, and workflows that support real-world deployment.

IBM shares surged as much as 6% in premarket trading on June 25, 2026, after the company's research labs unveiled what they describe as the world's first sub-1-nanometer chip technology. The breakthrough, called "nanostack," achieves a 0.7-nanometer (7 angstrom) gate length by stacking transistors in three dimensions rather than across a flat surface. IBM claims the architecture delivers up to 50% more performance or 70% greater energy efficiency compared to current 2-nanometer chips, with memory cells 40% smaller for AI workloads and AI accelerator speeds estimated at roughly 6x today's hardware — potentially cutting large model training times from three months to two weeks.

The announcement came alongside additional catalysts: JPMorgan upgraded IBM to overweight and raised its price target to $291, and President Trump signed quantum computing acceleration executive orders at an event IBM CEO Arvind Krishna attended. IBM no longer manufactures chips itself, licensing designs to foundry partners including TSMC, Samsung, and Intel. The company expects sub-1-nanometer production to be commercially available within five years, meaning the nanostack results remain lab-stage for now.