IBM Shares Plummet 25% in Record Daily Drop After Q2 Revenue Miss

IBM shares plummeted 25.2% on July 14, 2026, marking the company's worst single-day decline in its recorded history after pre-announcing second-quarter revenue of $17.2 billion, which fell short of Wall Street's $17.9 billion expectation ^[1][2]. The drop erased approximately $68.8 billion in market value as investors reacted harshly to the miss in both revenue and adjusted earnings per share of $2.93, which trailed the consensus of $3.01 ^[1][2]. CEO Arvind Krishna attributed the shortfall to delayed deals and a strategic shift by clients toward AI hardware, servers, and memory rather than IBM's traditional mainframe and software stack . This plunge serves as a stark warning that markets are aggressively punishing even modest misses by companies with stretched valuations in the AI era, signaling that customer spending priorities are rapidly redirecting toward pure AI infrastructure .