IBM points to change of direction in the AI ​​race after companies begin to prioritize another investment front

The IBM (IBM) reported results below Wall Street’s expectations for the second quarter of 2026 and attributed the weaker performance to a change in customer behavior.

According to the technology giant, companies began to prioritize investments in hardware infrastructure to the detriment of software and systems linked to artificial intelligence.

In the quarter in question, the North American company reported adjusted earnings of $2.93 per sharewith revenue of US$ 17.2 billionwhile analysts expected earnings of $3.01 per share before invoicing US$17.86 billion.

In a letter to investors, the CEO Arvind Krishna stated that the mainframe line of the line IBM Zthe company’s main platform for enterprise processing, was affected by a weaker than expected pace of purchases.

According to the executive, the expectation was for a slight drop in revenue from the infrastructure division throughout the year, but the result was significantly worse due to the weakness of the Z platform and software linked to transaction processing.

According to Krishna, in the last weeks of June customers started to focus their budgets on purchasing servers, storage and memoryanticipating acquisitions given the expectation of price increases and the limited supply of this equipment.

IBM Z’s main bet is the IBM z17a mainframe equipped with AI resources capable of detecting fraud in real time in financial operations, without the need to transfer data to other platforms.

In practice, the movement caused part of the investments to migrate from the software layer to the infrastructure necessary to support artificial intelligence applications.

According to IBM, some impact of this dynamic was already in sight, but the intensity of the change surprised the company.

*Supervised by Ricardo Gozzi