IBM surges after Barclays initiates with a buy, video of Trump in 2025 saying stock will “go up a lot more” resurfaces
IBM shares are jumping in early trading because of both old and new praise. The old: a video featuring President Donald Trump complimenting the company’s CEO, Arvind Krishna, was reshared by Polymarket Money’s X account, but without the context of it being from December. The new: Barclays initiated coverage of IBM at “overweight” with a $350 price target.
Barclays analyst Raimo Lenschow urged investors to stop looking at IBM through the lens of legacy hardware in a Monday note. Instead, he said to focus on the sheer defensive dominance of IBM’s highly specialized software segment, which currently generates nearly half of the corporation’s overall revenue and the vast majority of its net profit.
“While software has a negative investor connotation at the moment, IBM is offering infrastructure software (the good part) to large, often heavily regulated customers, which creates a very sticky set-up that should not see negative AI implications,” Lenschow noted.
Compounding the institutional buying enthusiasm is a wave of retail momentum triggered by social media posts, as traders on X and TikTok began widely sharing a video clip from 2025 where Trump explicitly praises the technology company, confidently stating that IBM stock is going to “go up a lot more.”
Trump says $IBM is “going to go up a lot more.”pic.twitter.com/KgzV0qy19j
— Polymarket Money (@PolymarketMoney) May 31, 2026
IBM’s move builds on momentum from last week following its commitment to spend $10 billion in quantum computing over the next five years to build the first large-scale quantum computer. This comes after the Trump administration signed a number of letters of intent to award a total of $2 billion in grants to nine quantum companies, including IBM, in deals that also include equity stakes.