IBM's 25% Crash Says AI Capex Is Eating Its Own Vendors Now

IBM fell 25% overnight, wiping roughly 68 billion dollars in a single session, per the Telegraph, the worst day on record for a company that has sat inside enterprise IT budgets since before most CISOs were born. The stated reason, per the FT, is that IBM's own customers are shifting spend toward AI infrastructure and away from IBM's legacy services line. That is the tell this column has been circling: AI capex is not additive to enterprise budgets, it is substitutive, and the vendors getting cut are the ones without a frontier model to sell. Nvidia's chip export story moved the other way, Washington telling SCMP the H200 approvals into China remain trivial in volume, a claim that Commerce Department shipment data due this quarter will confirm or contradict. The Hormuz standoff ran on its own timeline: Trump's 20% cargo levy announced and reversed within hours per Reuters, oil holding above 85 dollars per the Times, and Iranian missiles now hitting UAE tankers directly, the war's fourth night widening rather than resolving. On the sports desk, a 9.612 billion dollar Seahawks sale froze on a rounding error, a reminder that even the most liquid deals seize on decimal points. Watch IBM's Thursday guidance call and whether rivals confirm the same substitution pattern.