IBM blames AI capex, not obsolescence, for its mainframe sales collapse

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After IBM's stock crashed on weak mainframe guidance, the CEO argued AI spending temporarily consumed corporate hardware budgets rather than AI replacing mainframes outright. It's the first major case of an incumbent hardware vendor publicly attributing a revenue miss to budget cannibalization by AI infrastructure. Whether 'temporarily' holds is the open question — the counter-read is that this is a permanent reallocation being framed as a timing issue.