Wedbush Securities has raised its price target on International Business Machines Corp (NYSE:IBM) from $320 to $350 while maintaining its outperform rating, arguing that a wave of AI-driven disruption fears that weighed on the stock earlier this year has proved unfounded and…
at the company’s underlying momentum across its core product portfolio is strengthening. The upgrade follows what Wedbush describes as a period in which IBM was caught up in what it terms the “AI Ghost Trade,” a de-rating driven by concerns that Claude Code, Anthropic’s AI coding tool, could modernise legacy COBOL systems and bypass IBM’s entrenched enterprise install base entirely
Wedbush pushed back on that thesis in February, arguing that AI was more likely to accelerate legacy transformation projects than circumvent them, and the bank now believes those fears have largely dissipated. Channel checks point to solid momentum across IBM’s AI, hybrid cloud, automation, and cybersecurity product lines, with enterprise customers increasingly seeking the kind of trusted, scalable, and compliance-ready solutions that IBM’s integrated software, consulting, and infrastructure stack is designed to deliver. A significant strategic development is IBM’s $11 billion acquisition of Confluent, the data streaming platform, which Wedbush frames as a move to deepen the company’s data processing capabilities across its hybrid cloud ecosystem and strengthen end-to-end integrations spanning applications, analytics, data systems, and AI agents.
IBM has also reported $4.5 billion in internal productivity gains to date, a figure that does not yet include savings attributed to IBM Bob, the company’s internal AI deployment. On quantum computing, Wedbush acknowledges the technology remains years from commercial scale, with IBM targeting the first fault-tolerant quantum computer by 2029, but views the company’s approximately $10 billion investment programme as a long-term positive, positioning IBM at the intersection…