IBM Just Pre-Announced an Earnings Miss. The Reason Reveals Where AI Money Is Really Flowing.

IBM (NYSE: IBM) didn't wait for its scheduled earnings date. On Tuesday, a week ahead of its July 22 report, the enterprise software and hardware giant released preliminary second-quarter results in a letter to investors from CEO Arvind Krishna. The numbers were disappointing. Revenue totaled $17.2 billion, up just 1% year over year and short of the company's own expectations.

Investors didn't take it well. Shares fell about 24% on Tuesday, one of the worst single-day drops in the company's history, and slid further on Wednesday to a 52-week low. IBM's market capitalization now sits below $200 billion.

But the most interesting part of the pre-announcement isn't the miss itself. It's Krishna's explanation of what happened in the last few weeks of June, because it says a lot about where technology budgets are actually going in the AI (artificial intelligence) buildout.

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What went wrong in the quarter

The shortfall was a sharp reversal. In the first quarter, IBM's revenue rose 9% year over year, led by infrastructure revenue that jumped 15% as the company's new z17 mainframe rolled out. IBM expected that mainframe momentum to fade as the launch wrapped up, guiding for infrastructure revenue to decline by a low-single-digit rate for the year.

Instead, second-quarter infrastructure revenue fell 7%, software grew just 5%, and consulting was flat. The deceleration reached the bottom line, too. Earnings per share of $2.27 declined 2% year over year, though earnings per share on a non-GAAP (adjusted) basis climbed 5%.

So, what happened? According to Krishna, IBM's clients abruptly changed their spending priorities.

"In the last few weeks of June, we saw clients shift their quarterly capex spend toward servers, storage, and memory purchases to secure supply constrained infrastructure ahead of expected price increases," Krishna explained in his letter. He added that the company "did not anticipate the magnitude of the capex reprioritization," and that numerous large deals failed to close on the timelines IBM expected, driving the majority of the shortfall. Krishna also noted that clients were distracted by rapidly evolving, industrywide cybersecurity concerns during the quarter.

Put another way, customers spent their quarterly technology budgets stockpiling hardware before prices went up, and other purchases got pushed out.

Where the money went instead

What stands out to me is that IBM's own report shows where those dollars landed. The company's distributed infrastructure business, which includes its Power servers and storage hardware, grew 37% year over year, its best performance in the company's reported history. The unit exited the quarter with a backlog of about $500 million. Even inside the company that missed, the money moved toward hardware.

The memory market shows the same scramble at a much larger scale. Micron Technology, one of the world's biggest memory-chip makers, reported revenue of $41.5 billion in its most recent quarter, up 346% year over year, as its DRAM selling prices more than doubled. And Micron says AI-driven demand for memory and storage has accelerated at a rate greater than the industry's ability to increase supply.

The AI buildout, in other words, is no longer just the giant cloud companies pouring capital into data centers. Ordinary enterprises are now competing for the same servers, storage, and memory, and they're pulling money from the rest of their technology budgets to secure it. That's a tailwind for memory and AI-infrastructure suppliers, whose products are the ones being stockpiled. And it's a new risk for any vendor whose quarter depends on large deals closing on schedule, because a customer racing to lock in hardware can put everything else on hold.

For IBM specifically, the July 22 earnings call now comes down to one thing: Were those slipped deals lost, or merely delayed? Management said it will discuss its full-year expectations on the call, and coming into this quarter, the company had guided for constant-currency revenue growth of more than 5% in 2026. If that outlook survives, most of this quarter's damage was a timing issue. If it comes down, the problem may be bigger than one quarter.

I think the bigger lesson, though, is the one Krishna spelled out himself. When customers are grabbing supply constrained hardware ahead of price hikes, the AI infrastructure cycle isn't cooling. It's strong enough to change the spending patterns of the world's largest companies -- and investors should expect it to show up in more earnings reports from here.

Daniel Sparks and his clients do not have positions in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends International Business Machines and Micron Technology. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.