Just after IBM提前披露了 its second-quarter results, the stock price immediately kept dropping all the way... dragging down the software sector as well.

Underperformance versus expectations is only the surface. More alarming is IBM’s explanation for the shortfall.
BM said that in the last few weeks of June, with supply tightness and potential price increases, customers prioritized shifting quarterly capital expenditures toward hardware—servers, storage, and memory—leading to many large software-related deals not being completed as planned.
That line is extremely damaging to the entire software industry because it breaks a previously more optimistic assumption: that enterprises would continue buying existing software while also adding AI budgets.
But in reality, it’s this: overall IT budget growth is limited. AI servers, GPUs, storage, and memory take the budget first, while traditional software has to wait in line.
The money does go first to servers, storage, and memory, rather than being distributed evenly across all technology products.
So, once this news hit, the benefiting and suffering sectors split immediately.