--- title: AI Is Slowing Mainframe Sales. But Can the World Really... description: IBM's recent warning of a temporary mainframe sales slowdown, attributed partly to AI infrastructure spending, sparked debate about whether mainframes remain... canonical: https://daily.dev/posts/ai-is-slowing-mainframe-sales-but-can-the-world-really-do-without-them--jblwtwnhi twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:site: @dailydotdev og:type: website og:site_name: daily.dev og:title: AI Is Slowing Mainframe Sales. But Can the World Really Do Without Them? | daily.dev og:description: IBM's recent warning of a temporary mainframe sales slowdown, attributed partly to AI infrastructure spending, sparked debate about whether mainframes remain... og:url: https://daily.dev/posts/ai-is-slowing-mainframe-sales-but-can-the-world-really-do-without-them--jblwtwnhi og:image: https://api.daily.dev/og/posts/JBLWtwnhi.png og:image:alt: AI Is Slowing Mainframe Sales. But Can the World Really Do Without Them? og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 630 og:locale: en --- > ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://daily.dev/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. # AI Is Slowing Mainframe Sales. But Can the World Really Do Without Them? **[Codemotion](https://daily.dev/sources/codemotion)** · 9 min read · 0 upvotes · 0 comments ## Summary IBM's recent warning of a temporary mainframe sales slowdown, attributed partly to AI infrastructure spending, sparked debate about whether mainframes remain relevant. The piece argues mainframes persist because they solve a narrow but critical problem: guaranteeing ACID transaction integrity at massive scale with five-nines reliability, dedicated I/O co-processors, and fast batch processing. Core banking systems built over decades in COBOL are too risky to replace, so they're incrementally extended instead. Modern IBM Z systems now also run Java, Linux, containers, and built-in AI inference accelerators for real-time fraud detection, positioning the mainframe as a stable anchor within larger distributed architectures rather than a technology being displaced by AI. ## Full article daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. Read it at the original source: ## Questions this post answers ### What are the four ACID properties in database transactions? ACID stands for Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, and Durability. Atomicity means a transaction either fully completes or fully rolls back, as when a $50 transfer between accounts must both debit and credit successfully. Consistency ensures the database only moves between valid states, such as blocking an overdraft. Isolation keeps concurrent transactions from interfering with each other, and durability guarantees a completed transaction survives crashes or power loss. _Anyone weighing database guarantees for transactional systems can track deeper explainers like this on daily.dev._ ### Why do banks still use mainframes instead of modern relational databases? Mainframes offer dedicated I/O co-processors separate from the main CPU, letting them process tens of thousands of financial transactions per second without bottlenecks that standard x86 servers face under massive global load. They also deliver five-nines uptime through duplicated or triplicated hardware components that hot-swap on failure, and they run nightly batch jobs, like overnight interest calculations, far faster than a standard relational database not optimized for that workload. _Engineers deciding between mainframe and cloud-native architectures can follow these tradeoffs on daily.dev._ ### Why is COBOL still used in banking systems? COBOL remains dominant in banking because millions of lines of code, written since 1959, encode business rules and tax logic refined over 40 to 50 years, and rewriting them risks introducing bugs into procedures that have worked reliably for decades. Created to be readable by non-specialists and built around records and accounting entries, COBOL systems are extended and integrated with modern technology rather than replaced wholesale. _Developers maintaining legacy COBOL systems can keep up with modernization debates on daily.dev._ ## Similar posts on daily.dev - [IBM says AI is insane in the mainframe as z17 sales surge](https://daily.dev/posts/ibm-says-ai-is-insane-in-the-mainframe-as-z17-sales-surge-flvanbvn4) · The Register · 0 upvotes · 0 comments --- Tags: [#infrastructure](https://daily.dev/tags/infrastructure), [#ibm](https://daily.dev/tags/ibm) [View this post on daily.dev](https://daily.dev/posts/ai-is-slowing-mainframe-sales-but-can-the-world-really-do-without-them--jblwtwnhi) ```json {"@context":"https://schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"Organization","@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization","name":"daily.dev","url":"https://daily.dev","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://daily.dev/apple-touch-icon.png","width":180,"height":180},"sameAs":["https://twitter.com/dailydotdev","https://github.com/dailydotdev","https://www.linkedin.com/company/daily-dev-ltd"]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https://daily.dev/#website","url":"https://daily.dev","name":"daily.dev","publisher":{"@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization"},"potentialAction":{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https://daily.dev/search?q={search_term_string}"},"query-input":"required name=search_term_string"}}]} {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"TechArticle","headline":"AI Is Slowing Mainframe Sales. 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