Three new names just joined BTSE’s stock perpetual futures market: IBM, Nebius Group, and ServiceNow.Each one represents a different layer of the enterprise AI buildout that traditional equity investors have been racing to position around in 2026.
IBM is the legacy technology giant betting its hybrid cloud and consulting business on AI adoption inside Fortune 500 companies. Nebius is one of the fastest-growing AI cloud infrastructure providers, supplying the GPU computer that hyperscalers need to train and run their models. ServiceNow is the workflow automation platform trying to become the control layer for AI agents operating inside enterprise systems.
This article breaks down what makes each company compelling right now and how you can start trading them as stock perpetual futures.
Why Enterprise AI Stocks Are Drawing Trader Attention
Enterprise software and IT services companies don’t generate the same headlines as chipmakers, but the AI buildout runs through them just as directly. Every company deploying AI agents, migrating workloads to the cloud, or modernizing legacy infrastructure eventually needs the consulting, compute, or workflow tooling that IBM, Nebius, and ServiceNow each provide in different ways.
Trading these names as stock perpetual futures means you can go long or short on price movement with up to 50x leverage, 24 hours a day, without needing a traditional brokerage account. Assets in your spot wallet need to be manually transferred to your futures wallet before they can be used as margin, so keep that step in mind before opening a position.
IBM (IBM-PERP): Betting on AI Inside the Enterprise
- Ticker: IBM-PERP
- Market Cap: ~$267B
- YTD Performance: down approximately 19%
IBM has spent the last several years repositioning itself around hybrid cloud and AI, layering generative AI into its consulting, software, and infrastructure businesses rather than chasing a single flashy product launch.
The company’s strategy is less about building frontier AI models and more about deploying them inside the enterprise environments it has served for decades, such as think Fortune 500 companies modernizing mainframes, digitizing back-office operations, and integrating AI agents into workflows that previously required armies of consultants.
That positioning comes with a built-in distribution advantage that most pure-play AI companies lack. IBM already has long-term contracts, trusted relationships, and certified consultants embedded inside some of the world’s largest organizations. When those clients decide to move forward with AI adoption, IBM is often the default starting point, which is why the company’s AI-related consulting backlog has become one of the most closely watched metrics on Wall Street.
In its first quarter of 2026, IBM reported revenue and adjusted earnings that both topped Wall Street’s expectations, with revenue of $15.92 billion coming in ahead of consensus. Even so, the stock slipped in after-hours trading — not because the quarter disappointed, but because IBM held its full-year guidance flat rather than raising it, which disappointed investors who had expected an upgrade given the beat.
The consulting segment, where roughly 30% of the backlog is now tied to generative AI projects, remained a focus of scrutiny. The market’s reaction highlighted the central tension the stock faces: strong demand signals but questions about how quickly that demand converts into recognized revenue.
IBM also carries a more complex balance sheet than many of its tech peers, partly a legacy of past acquisitions including Red Hat, which remains central to its hybrid cloud story. That complexity means the stock tends to reward patient investors who understand the business cycle of large enterprise contracts — and creates short-term volatility that active traders can use to their advantage.
The bull case rests on AI demand converting steadily into recognized revenue across software, infrastructure, and consulting. The bear case centers on whether AI tools eventually compress the high-margin consulting work IBM has historically relied on. With the stock down meaningfully year to date despite a string of earnings beats, IBM-PERP gives traders a way to take a leveraged position on how that debate resolves, long or short, without waiting for the next quarterly result.
Nebius Group (NBIS-PERP): The AI Cloud Builder Behind the Scenes
- Ticker: NBIS-PERP
- Market Cap: ~$66B
- YTD Performance: up more than 175% year to date
Nebius doesn’t build AI models. It builds the infrastructure from GPU clusters, data centers, to cloud platforms that the companies building those models actually run on. While most investor attention has gone to the AI labs themselves, Nebius has quietly become one of the most important picks-and-shovels plays in the entire sector, providing the raw compute that hyperscalers cannot get fast enough from existing cloud providers.
The company was founded in 2022 following a restructuring of Yandex’s international operations, Russia’s dominant technology conglomerate, before being relisted on Nasdaq as an independent AI infrastructure business. That restructuring gave it a clean slate, a focused mandate, and access to capital markets at exactly the moment global demand for GPU compute was accelerating past the supply available from the major cloud platforms.
That positioning turned into some of the largest computer supply deals signed anywhere in the industry. Nebius first secured a five-year agreement with Microsoft worth up to $19.4 billion, then in March 2026, Meta committed to an additional five-year deal worth up to $27 billion, which is a figure that exceeded the company’s entire market capitalization at the time the deal was announced. Together, these two contracts gave Nebius the largest external AI compute commitments secured by any cloud provider in 2026.
The scale of those commitments matters beyond the headline revenue numbers. Multi-year hyperscaler contracts provide revenue visibility that most growth-stage companies would never have, and they validate Nebius’s infrastructure quality at a level that smaller competitors cannot easily replicate. Each new data center buildout also compounds the company’s capacity advantage, making it progressively harder for new entrants to catch up.
For traders, Nebius is essentially a leveraged bet on hyperscaler AI capital expenditure without having to pick which AI lab ultimately wins. As Meta, Microsoft, and others keep pouring tens of billions into compute, a meaningful share of that spending flows directly into Nebius’s order book. The stock’s sharp year-to-date gain reflects how quickly the market re-rated that thesis, which was further validated when Nebius was added to the Nasdaq-100 Index on June 22, 2026, alongside CoreWeave.
NBIS-PERP lets traders take a position on whether that momentum continues, with the flexibility of 24/7 trading hours.
ServiceNow (NOW-PERP): The Control Layer for Enterprise AI Agents
- Ticker: NOW-PERP
- Market Cap: ~$97B
- YTD Performance: down roughly 35% to 39%
ServiceNow has spent two decades automating workflows across IT, HR, finance, and customer service inside large organizations. In 2026, it’s trying to extend that role to AI agents themselves, becoming not just the platform that automates human work, but the governance layer that manages what AI is allowed to do inside an enterprise and how.
The company’s Now Assist product line sits at the center of that strategy. It embeds AI capabilities directly into the workflows ServiceNow already manages, allowing organizations to automate ticket resolution, generate reports, and surface recommendations without replacing their existing systems. That approach, as augmenting rather than replacing, is deliberately positioned to reduce the friction of AI adoption inside large, risk-averse institutions that cannot afford operational disruption.
The numbers back that narrative up. In Q1 2026, ServiceNow reported subscription revenues of $3.67 billion, up 22% year-over-year, beating the high end of its own guidance across every key metric. Now Assist customers spending over $1 million in annual contract value grew over 130% year-over-year in the same quarter, making it one of the fastest-scaling enterprise AI product lines in the software industry.
The company has been pushing hard on what it calls AI agent governance: tools that let enterprises track which AI agents are connected to which systems, who approved that access, and whether an agent can actually be trusted to act autonomously.
ServiceNow has positioned its Now Assist product line as central to that growth story, even as broader market anxiety about AI agents replacing traditional software seats weighed on the stock for much of the year.
That anxiety — sometimes called the “SaaSpocalypse” thesis on Wall Street — is the key overhang on ServiceNow’s share price. The fear is that AI agents will eventually replace the per-seat software subscriptions that underpin ServiceNow’s revenue model, shrinking the addressable market rather than expanding it.
ServiceNow’s counter-argument is that it is building the tooling those agents will run on, turning the threat into a growth vector. Whether that reframe holds up is the central debate the stock is trading around right now.
That disconnect between operating performance and share price is precisely what makes ServiceNow compelling for stock perp traders. If the market’s fear proves overdone, ServiceNow’s positioning as the governance layer for enterprise AI agents could be a significant re-rating catalyst.
If the fear is justified, the downside case is just as tradable. NOW-PERP gives traders direct exposure to that debate, in either direction, around the clock.
How Stock Perpetual Futures Work on BTSE
A stock perpetual futures contract tracks the price of an underlying stock without ever expiring, as long as sufficient margin is maintained. Unlike buying shares through a traditional brokerage, holding a stock perp doesn’t give you ownership of the underlying company; it gives you a leveraged long or short position on price movement alone, funded with USDT.
IBM, Nebius, and ServiceNow join the growing catalog of stock and commodity perps on BTSE, all managed through the Unified Futures Wallet alongside your crypto perpetual positions. Traditional stock markets close at 4 PM Eastern and stay shut on weekends, but stock perps don’t, which means you can react to earnings surprises, partnership announcements, or macro shifts the moment they happen.
Full fee details are on the Fees & Transaction Limits page.
Trade the Enterprise AI Story on Your Terms
IBM, Nebius, and ServiceNow each sit at a different point in the enterprise AI value chain, but together they represent one of the clearest ways to express a view on whether AI spending inside large organizations keeps accelerating.
All three are now available as stock perpetual futures on BTSE’s futures trading platform, alongside the full catalog of stock, commodity, and crypto perps. For a broader look at everything currently live, visit BTSE’s markets page.
Create an account and start trading IBM, Nebius, and ServiceNow with leverage today — the enterprise AI buildout doesn’t wait for market hours, and now neither do you.
