A wave of selling hit AI-adjacent stocks last week, triggered by a surprise revenue miss from IBM and spreading fast across the enterprise tech sector. IBM CEO Arvind Krishna revealed that clients spent the final weeks of June pulling capital out of software and consulting deals to panic-buy supply-constrained servers and memory ahead of expected price hikes. That announcement sent IBM shares down more than 20% — the stock’s worst single-day drop since the 1987 crash — and dragged Workday (WDAY), ServiceNow (NOW), Salesforce (CRM), and Accenture (ACN) lower in sympathy. The selloff is being called “SaaSmageddon” by some on Wall Street, and it has created significant dislocations in stocks that have nothing fundamentally wrong with them.
The irony is that while IBM cratered, Samsung simultaneously reported a preliminary Q2 operating profit of roughly 89.4 trillion won — nearly $60 billion — up 19 times year over year, driven almost entirely by AI memory demand. The same hardware shortage that is minting record profits for chipmakers and memory producers is disrupting enterprise software budgets everywhere else. Among the names that analysts argue are now attractively priced after the pullback: SpaceX (SPCX), which carries buy ratings from Goldman Sachs ($205 target), Morgan Stanley ($300 target), and Oppenheimer, with revenue estimates jumping from $18.6 billion to $38.7 billion this year and projections reaching $135 billion by 2028. Palantir (PLTR) sits roughly 26-27% below its recent highs after getting caught in the SaaS selloff despite having fundamentally different revenue drivers. Amazon (AMZN) just tapped debt markets for $25 billion to fund AI infrastructure while trading at 22.6 times forward earnings — near a five-year low. TeraWulf (WULF) recently signed a 20-year, $19 billion deal with Anthropic for a 401-megawatt AI campus in Kentucky, validating its pivot from Bitcoin miner to AI infrastructure landlord. And Meta Platforms (META) continues building AI infrastructure through custom chips and massive computing expansion despite near-term sentiment headwinds.
The actionable angle here is straightforward: the AI infrastructure buildout has not slowed. What changed is that investors got spooked by IBM’s idiosyncratic problem — clients front-loading hardware buys — and sold indiscriminately. Samsung’s blowout results confirm that AI spending is accelerating, not retreating. For retail investors, this type of sentiment-driven selloff in quality names with concrete AI revenue streams is historically where long-term entries are made. The stocks that fell due to guilt-by-association with IBM rather than their own fundamentals deserve a closer look at current prices. Watch September hike odds for the macro backdrop, and watch each company’s next earnings report for confirmation that capex trends remain intact. The dip looks like opportunity rather than a trend reversal.
