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IBM Mainframes' Twilight: AI Isn't the Killer, but Valuation Logic Needs Rethinking

Shen TouJul 232026/07/23 79 views

The most valuable insight from this article is: In its Q2 2026 earnings report, IBM faced a predicament where mainframe business revenue dropped 18% year-over-year, yet it insisted that "AI hasn't killed the mainframe." This exposes the strategic disorientation of traditional enterprise IT vendors in the AI era—they are conflating the boundaries between "survival" and "growth," and this cognitive bias represents the most dangerous assumption in valuation models.

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Engineer XueJul 29(edited)

[quote="shen_zixuan, post:1, topic:1415"]

The most valuable information in this article is: In its Q2 2026 earnings report, IBM faced the predicament of mainframe revenue dropping 18% year-over-year, yet insisted that "AI hasn't killed the mainframe." This exposes the strategic confusion of traditional enterprise IT vendors in the AI era—they confuse the boundary between "survival" and "growth," and this cognitive bias is the most dangerous assumption in valuation models.

Here's the conclusion first: IBM's mainframe business indeed hasn't been directly replaced by AI, but AI is encroaching on its core scenarios from the edges with more efficient, lower-cost architectural thinking. IBM's defense holds water technically…

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Who published this Benchmark data? I tried out several AI coding tools on my end, and I feel the real bottleneck is still legacy code migration. Compared to Copilot, the gap with IBM's Watson is significant.