Trump praised IBM's 'legend' CEO, government floated a $1B quantum award — is the stock still a 'very nice price'?

At a White House business roundtable on Dec. 10, 2025, President Donald Trump singled out IBM (NYSE:IBM) chief executive Arvind Krishna, who was in the room. He called Krishna "a legend" and credited him with taking the company's stock "from a rather low price to a very nice price," then added: "I won't say high because I'm sure you're going to say it's going to go up a lot more, right?" (1)

The clip resurfaced and spread widely in late May 2026, often stripped of that context and framed as breaking news. The reason: a newly announced IBM partnership with the government.

On May 21, 2026, IBM and the US Department of Commerce announced a proposed $1 billion CHIPS Act award to build America's first purpose-built quantum chip foundry — a new standalone IBM company called Anderon, headquartered in Albany, New York. (2)

The federal money is a proposed incentive, not cash already in hand, and IBM is matching it with $1 billion of its own, plus intellectual property and workforce. (3) IBM's award was the largest slice of a broader $2.01 billion package the Commerce Department spread across nine companies. GlobalFoundries (NASDAQ:GFS) is in line for $375 million, with five firms — Atom Computing, D-Wave, Infleqtion, PsiQuantum and Quantinuum — getting $100 million each, Rigetti up to $100 million and Diraq $38 million. In exchange, the government takes minority, non-controlling equity stakes rather than handing out subsidies. (3)

IBM's announcement disclosed no equity stake for Anderon — unlike GlobalFoundries, which confirmed a 1% government stake in its spinoff, or Intel, whose CHIPS award the administration converted into a roughly 10% stake last year. (4)

Investors responded. IBM shares closed up about 12% on May 21, the stock's biggest single-day gain since January 2025. (5) The rally extended through the following week after IBM detailed plans to invest more than $10 billion in quantum computing over five years and a separate $5 billion Red Hat cybersecurity push, carrying the stock to $297.80 by the May 29 close — a weekly gain of roughly 13%. (6)

According to Trump's Q1 2026 periodic transaction report, filed with the US Office of Government Ethics on May 8, IBM appears among the holdings — not as a single headline-grabbing buy, but as part of routine, two-way trading activity. (7)

The filing lists eight IBM transactions between February and March 2026: four purchases and four sales, every one in the two smallest reporting bands, from $1,001 to $50,000. Two of the purchases carry an "unsolicited" tag, meaning the trade was placed by a money manager without the filer's direction. They sit among thousands of transactions across hundreds of companies — the signature of a broad, actively managed portfolio rather than a targeted bet.