(IBM) stock has fallen 3.0% over the past week and dropped 14.7% over the past month, but it is still up 2.2% over the last 12 months. Wall Street’s analysts are moderately bullish, forecasting a move toward a 12‑month average price target of $333.73 from a last closing price of $248.87.
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Trade IBM with leverageJames Schneider of Goldman Sachs has reiterated his Buy rating on IBM, setting a price target of $365.00 that suggests meaningful upside from current levels. His view runs counter to recent market worries that advances in AI could weaken IBM’s core mainframe business.
Schneider argues that fears around AI tools replacing IBM mainframes are overstated, even as products like Anthropic’s Claude Code for COBOL have fueled investor anxiety. He believes IBM’s Z mainframes owe their strength to cost advantages in handling large-scale transaction processing, not to dependence on legacy COBOL software.
According to his analysis, mainframes can be 17% to 50% cheaper than public cloud when workloads reach enterprise scale, particularly above 30,000 MIPS, with many global banks operating well over 100,000 MIPS. Schneider estimates that more than 80% of IBM’s mainframe customers already run at such scale, reinforcing IBM’s cost edge as workloads grow.
Still, he warns that sentiment shifts around software and AI could keep IBM’s shares volatile, especially after strong past performance and multiple expansion. This N‑star analyst ranks 529 out of 12,076 on TipRanks, with a 61.82% success rate and a 22.10% average return per rating. Never miss a stock rating. Find all the latest ratings on TipRanks’ Top Wall Street Analysts page.