IBM Drops 25% in Record Single-Day Rout as Mainframe Revenue Plunges 42%
- IBM shares tumbled 25% — their biggest one-day decline ever — after Q2 mainframe revenue fell 42% on budget shifts to AI hardware; revenue was $17.2B and net earnings $2.2B (briefs.co).
- CEO Arvind Krishna said the quarter "was worse than our expectations"; data center memory and component prices up 15–30% pushed customers to redirect spending to GPUs and high-bandwidth memory instead of mainframes.
- IBM lowered full-year growth forecasts, though CFO Jim Kavanaugh noted software revenue is roughly 3x mainframe hardware revenue; Krishna insisted customers are delaying, not abandoning, the platform.