mainframe

The tech industry might have abandoned powerful-but-specialized mainframe computers and shifted to the cloud, but IBM’s customers—what you might call the “real” economy—still lean heavily on them.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Jul. 23, 2026

When delivering its profit warning last week, IBM pointed to recent challenges in its mainframe business.

From MarketWatch ● Jul. 22, 2026

“I think you might see some, ‘Hey, we’ll hold off on this for a couple quarters…we don’t need to upgrade to the new mainframe right now,’” Morgan said.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Jul. 16, 2026

The problem was the launch of the z17 mainframe program, which the company expected to be wrapping up during the second quarter.

From MarketWatch ● Jul. 14, 2026

The university’s enormous mainframe computers stood in the middle of a vast white room, looking, as one faculty member remembers, “like one of the last scenes in the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey.”

From "Outliers" by Malcolm Gladwell

It sure smells like IBM mainframes of old.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Oct. 11, 2026

Hardware sales are only about 20% of IBM’s revenue, and mainframes are about a quarter of hardware sales, but its software and consulting services are heavily dependent on those sales.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Jul. 23, 2026

IBM’s warning suggested AI infrastructure spending is now displacing hardware budgets, too—squeezing a company whose customers install traditional systems in their own data centers and can defer big-ticket upgrades such as mainframes.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Jul. 22, 2026

However, Morningstar’s Yang explained that mainframes fall into a different class of hardware and process different workloads than hyperscaler servers do, for instance.

From MarketWatch ● Jul. 14, 2026

Computers up to that point had been the massive, expensive mainframes of the sort sitting in the white expanse of the Michigan Computer Center.

From "Outliers" by Malcolm Gladwell