At GTC 2025, NVIDIA announced the NVIDIA AI Data Platform, a customizable reference design that leading providers are using to build a new class of AI infrastructure for demanding AI inference workloads: enterprise storage platforms with AI query agents fueled by NVIDIA accelerated computing, networking and software. Using the NVIDIA AI Data Platform, NVIDIA-Certified Storage providers can build infrastructure to speed AI reasoning workloads with specialized AI query agents. These agents help businesses generate insights from data in near real time, using NVIDIA AI Enterprise software—including NVIDIA NIM microservices for the new NVIDIA Llama Nemotron models with reasoning capabilities—as well as the new NVIDIA AI-Q Blueprint.

Storage providers can optimize their infrastructure to power these agents with NVIDIA Blackwell GPUs, NVIDIA BlueField DPUs, NVIDIA Spectrum-X networking and the NVIDIA Dynamo open-source inference library. Leading data platform and storage providers—including DDN, Dell Technologies, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Hitachi Vantara, IBM, NetApp, Nutanix, Pure Storage, VAST Data and WEKA—are collaborating with NVIDIA to create customized AI data platforms that can harness enterprise data to reason and respond to complex queries. "Data is the raw material powering industries in the age of AI," said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA. "With the world's storage leaders, we're building a new class of enterprise infrastructure that companies need to deploy and scale agentic AI across hybrid data centers."

Ahead of Mobile World Congress 2025, Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. and IBM (NYSE: IBM) announced an expanded collaboration to drive enterprise-grade generative artificial intelligence (AI) solutions across edge and cloud devices designed to enable increased immediacy, privacy, reliability, personalization, and reduced cost and energy consumption. Through this collaboration, the companies plan to integrate watsonx.governance for generative AI solutions powered by Qualcomm Technologies' platforms, and enable support for IBM's Granite models through the Qualcomm AI Inference Suite and Qualcomm AI Hub.

"At Qualcomm Technologies, we are excited to join forces with IBM to deliver cutting-edge, enterprise-grade generative AI solutions for devices across the edge and cloud," said Durga Malladi, senior vice president and general manager, technology planning and edge solutions, Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. "This collaboration enables businesses to deploy AI solutions that are not only fast and personalized but also come with robust governance, monitoring, and decision-making capabilities, with the ability to enhance the overall reliability of AI from edge to cloud."

IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced it has completed its acquisition of HashiCorp, whose products automate and secure the infrastructure that underpins hybrid cloud applications and generative AI. Together the companies' capabilities will help clients accelerate innovation, strengthen security, and get more value from the cloud.

Today nearly 75% of enterprises are using hybrid cloud, including public clouds from hyperscalers and on-prem data centers, which can enable true innovation with a consistent approach to delivering and managing that infrastructure at scale. Enterprises are looking for ways to more efficiently manage and modernize cloud infrastructure and security tasks from initial planning and design, to ongoing maintenance. By 2028, it is projected that generative AI will lead to the creation of 1 billion new cloud-native applications. Supporting this scale requires infrastructure automation far beyond the capacity of the workforce alone.

IBM today debuted the next generation of its Granite large language model (LLM) family, Granite 3.2, in a continued effort to deliver small, efficient, practical enterprise AI for real-world impact. All Granite 3.2 models are available under the permissive Apache 2.0 license on Hugging Face. Select models are available today on IBM watsonx.ai, Ollama, Replicate, and LM Studio, and expected soon in RHEL AI 1.5 - bringing advanced capabilities to businesses and the open-source community.

IBM today is announcing its intent to acquire DataStax, an AI and data solution provider. DataStax's technology will enhance IBM's watsonx portfolio of products accelerating the use of generative AI, helping companies unlock value from vast amounts of unstructured data. The acquisition also builds on IBM's commitment to open-source AI. DataStax is the creator of AstraDB and DataStax Enterprise, NoSQL and vector database capabilities powered by Apache Cassandra; and Langflow, the open-source tool and community for low-code AI application development.

IBM will continue to support, engage, and innovate with the open-source Apache Cassandra, Langflow, Apache Pulsar, and OpenSearch communities in which DataStax participates. IBM's long-standing commitment to open-source AI includes the open-source IBM Granite foundation models and Instruct Lab, a revolutionary approach to advancing true open-source innovation around LLMs.

IBM and Lenovo today announced at LEAP 2025 a planned expansion of their strategic technology partnership designed to help scale the impact of generative AI for clients in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. IDC expects annual worldwide spending on AI-centric systems to surpass $300 billion by 2026, with many leading organizations in Saudi Arabia exploring and investing in generative AI use cases as they prepare for the emergence of an "AI everywhere" world.

Building upon their 20-year partnership, IBM and Lenovo will collaborate to deliver AI solutions comprised of technology from the IBM watsonx portfolio of AI products, including the Saudi Data and Artificial Intelligence Authority (SDAIA) open-source Arabic Large Language Model (ALLaM), and Lenovo infrastructure. These solutions are expected to help government and business clients in the Kingdom to accelerate their use of AI to improve public services and make data-driven decisions in areas such as fraud detection, public safety, customer service, code modernization, and IT operations.

IBM Research has unveiled a significant advancement in optical interconnect technology for advanced data center communications. The breakthrough centers on a novel co-packaged optics (CPO) system featuring a sophisticated Polymer Optical Waveguide (PWG) design, marking a potential shift from traditional copper-based interconnects. The innovation introduces a Photonic Integrated Circuit (PIC) measuring 8x10mm, mounted on a 17x17mm substrate, capable of converting electrical signals to optical ones and vice versa. The system's waveguide, spanning 12 mm in width, efficiently channels light waves through precisely engineered pathways, with channels converging from 250 to 50 micrometers.

While current copper-based solutions like NVIDIA's NVLink offer impressive 1.8 TB/s bandwidth rates, and Intel's Optical Compute Interconnect achieves 4 TBit/s bidirectional throughput, IBM's technology focuses on scalability and efficiency. The company plans to implement 12 carrier waves initially, with the potential to accommodate up to 32 waves by reducing spacing to 18 micrometers. Furthermore, the design allows for vertical stacking of up to four PWGs, potentially enabling 128 transmission channels. The technology has undergone rigorous JEDEC-standard testing, including 1,000 cycles of thermal stress between -40°C and 125°C, and extended exposure to extreme conditions including 85% humidity at 85°C. The components have also proven reliable during thousand-hour storage tests at various temperature extremes. The bandwidth of the CPO is currently unknown, but we expect it to surpass current solutions.

IBM and AMD have announced a collaboration to deploy AMD Instinct MI300X accelerators as a service on IBM Cloud. This offering, which is expected to be available in the first half of 2025, aims to enhance performance and power efficiency for Gen AI models such as and high-performance computing (HPC) applications for enterprise clients. This collaboration will also enable support for AMD Instinct MI300X accelerators within IBM's watsonx AI and data platform, as well as Red Hat Enterprise Linux AI inferencing support.

"As enterprises continue adopting larger AI models and datasets, it is critical that the accelerators within the system can process compute-intensive workloads with high performance and flexibility to scale," said Philip Guido, executive vice president and chief commercial officer, AMD. "AMD Instinct accelerators combined with AMD ROCm software offer wide support including IBM watsonx AI, Red Hat Enterprise Linux AI and Red Hat OpenShift AI platforms to build leading frameworks using these powerful open ecosystem tools. Our collaboration with IBM Cloud will aim to allow customers to execute and scale Gen AI inferencing without hindering cost, performance or efficiency."

Today at its inaugural IBM Quantum Developer Conference, IBM announced quantum hardware and software advancements to execute complex algorithms on IBM quantum computers with record levels of scale, speed, and accuracy.

IBM Quantum Heron, the company's most performant quantum processor to-date and available in IBM's global quantum data centers, can now leverage Qiskit to accurately run certain classes of quantum circuits with up to 5,000 two-qubit gate operations. Users can now use these capabilities to expand explorations in how quantum computers can tackle scientific problems across materials, chemistry, life sciences, high-energy physics, and more.

Alongside German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, senior European government officials and European-based global enterprises, IBM (NYSE: IBM) today unveiled the first IBM Quantum Data Center located outside of the United States. It is the company's second quantum data center in the world and marks a significant expansion of its fleet of advanced, utility-scale quantum systems available to global users via the cloud.

Now online in Ehningen, Germany, Europe's first IBM Quantum Data Center includes two new utility-scale, IBM Quantum Eagle-based systems, and will soon feature a new IBM Quantum Heron-based system. These systems are capable of performing computations beyond the brute-force simulation capabilities of classical computers.

IBM announced today the completion of its latest expansion of the IBM Quantum Data Center in Poughkeepsie, New York, which operates the highest number of available utility-scale quantum computers at a single location in the world. These systems are a part of the more than a dozen quantum computers offered to global clients via the IBM cloud.

To advance its mission of bringing useful quantum computing to the world, IBM has heavily invested in deploying advanced quantum hardware architectures. First introduced late last year, the IBM Quantum Heron processor has now been deployed in IBM's global Quantum Data Center in Poughkeepsie.

The Biden-Harris Administration announced today that Intel Corporation has been awarded up to $3 billion in direct funding under the CHIPS and Science Act for the Secure Enclave program. The program is designed to expand the trusted manufacturing of leading-edge semiconductors for the U.S. government.

The Secure Enclave program builds on previous projects between Intel and the Department of Defense (DoD) such as Rapid Assured Microelectronics Prototypes - Commercial (RAMP-C) and State-of-the-Art Heterogeneous Integration Prototype (SHIP). As the only American company that both designs and manufactures leading-edge logic chips, Intel will help secure the domestic chip supply chain and collaborate with the DoD to help enhance the resilience of U.S. technological systems by advancing secure, cutting-edge solutions.

IBM and Intel announced a global collaboration to deploy Intel Gaudi 3 AI accelerators as a service on IBM Cloud. This offering, which is expected to be available in early 2025, aims to help more cost-effectively scale enterprise AI and drive innovation underpinned with security and resiliency. This collaboration will also enable support for Gaudi 3 within IBM's watsonx AI and data platform. IBM Cloud is the first cloud service provider (CSP) to adopt Gaudi 3, and the offering will be available for both hybrid and on-premise environments.

"Unlocking the full potential of AI requires an open and collaborative ecosystem that provides customers with choice and accessible solutions. By integrating Gaudi 3 AI accelerators and Xeon CPUs with IBM Cloud, we are creating new AI capabilities and meeting the demand for affordable, secure and innovative AI computing solutions," said Justin Hotard, Intel executive vice president and general manager of the Data Center and AI Group.

The 63rd edition of the TOP500 reveals that Frontier has once again claimed the top spot, despite no longer being the only exascale machine on the list. Additionally, a new system has found its way into the Top 10.

The Frontier system at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, USA remains the most powerful system on the list with an HPL score of 1.206 EFlop/s. The system has a total of 8,699,904 combined CPU and GPU cores, an HPE Cray EX architecture that combines 3rd Gen AMD EPYC CPUs optimized for HPC and AI with AMD Instinct MI250X accelerators, and it relies on Cray's Slingshot 11 network for data transfer. On top of that, this machine has an impressive power efficiency rating of 52.93 GFlops/Watt - putting Frontier at the No. 13 spot on the GREEN500.

IBM applauds the EU Parliament's decision to adopt the EU AI Act, a significant milestone in establishing responsible AI regulation in the European Union. The EU AI Act provides a much-needed framework for ensuring transparency, accountability, and human oversight in developing and deploying AI technologies. While important work must be done to ensure the Act is successfully implemented, IBM believes the regulation will foster trust and confidence in AI systems while promoting innovation and competitiveness.

"I commend the EU for its leadership in passing comprehensive, smart AI legislation. The risk-based approach aligns with IBM's commitment to ethical AI practices and will contribute to building open and trustworthy AI ecosystems," said Christina Montgomery, Vice President and Chief Privacy & Trust Officer at IBM. "IBM stands ready to lend our technology and expertise - including our watsonx.governance product - to help our clients and other stakeholders comply with the EU AI Act and upcoming legislation worldwide so we can all unlock the incredible potential of responsible AI." For more information, visit watsonx.governance and ibm.com/consulting/ai-governance.

IBM has announced the official opening of the new IBM X-Force Cyber Range in Washington, DC. The range includes new custom training exercises specifically designed to help U.S. federal agencies, their suppliers and critical infrastructure organizations more effectively respond to persistent and disruptive cyberattacks, and threats posed by AI. The state-of-the-art facility is designed to help everyone from legal and mission-critical leaders, to the C-Suite and technical security leaders prepare for a real-world cyber incident. According to IBM's 2023 Cost of a Data Breach report the global average cost of a data breach reached $4.45 million, with the US facing the highest breach costs across all regions. Organizations that formed an incident response (IR) team and tested their IR plan experienced faster incident response times and lower costs than organizations that did neither. In fact, the report found that high levels of IR planning and testing saved industry and government nearly $1.5 million in breach costs and 54 days from the data breach lifecycle.

"From national security threats to supply chain disruptions impacting the goods and services we rely on every day, cyberattacks on government and critical infrastructure can have ramifications that go far beyond the balance sheet," said Alice Fakir, Partner, Lead of Cybersecurity Services, US Federal Market for IBM Consulting. "The elite and highly customizable cyber response training we provide at our new DC range helps organizations and federal agencies better defend against existing and emerging threats, and also addresses federal mandates like those in the Biden Administration's Executive Order 14028 focused on improving the nation's cybersecurity."

IBM announced the availability of the popular open-source Mixtral-8x7B large language model (LLM), developed by Mistral AI, on its watsonx AI and data platform, as it continues to expand capabilities to help clients innovate with IBM's own foundation models and those from a range of open-source providers. IBM offers an optimized version of Mixtral-8x7B that, in internal testing, was able to increase throughput—or the amount of data that can be processed in a given time period—by 50 percent when compared to the regular model. This could potentially cut latency by 35-75 percent, depending on batch size—speeding time to insights. This is achieved through a process called quantization, which reduces model size and memory requirements for LLMs and, in turn, can speed up processing to help lower costs and energy consumption.

The addition of Mixtral-8x7B expands IBM's open, multi-model strategy to meet clients where they are and give them choice and flexibility to scale enterprise AI solutions across their businesses. Through decades-long AI research and development, open collaboration with Meta and Hugging Face, and partnerships with model leaders, IBM is expanding its watsonx.ai model catalog and bringing in new capabilities, languages, and modalities. IBM's enterprise-ready foundation model choices and its watsonx AI and data platform can empower clients to use generative AI to gain new insights and efficiencies, and create new business models based on principles of trust. IBM enables clients to select the right model for the right use cases and price-performance goals for targeted business domains like finance.

Cyberattacks are an existential risk, with 89% of organizations ranking ransomware as one of the top five threats to their viability, according to a November 2023 report from TechTarget's Enterprise Strategy Group, a leading analyst firm. And this is just one of many risks to corporate data—insider threats, data exfiltration, hardware failures, and natural disasters also pose significant danger. Moreover, as the just-released 2024 IBM X-Force Threat Intelligence Index states, as the generative AI market becomes more established, it could trigger the maturity of AI as an attack surface, mobilizing even further investment in new tools from cybercriminals. The report notes that enterprises should also recognize that their existing underlying infrastructure is a gateway to their AI models that doesn't require novel tactics from attackers to target.

To help clients counter these threats with earlier and more accurate detection, we're announcing new AI-enhanced versions of the IBM FlashCore Module technology available inside new IBM Storage FlashSystem products and a new version of IBM Storage Defender software to help organizations improve their ability to detect and respond to ransomware and other cyberattacks that threaten their data. The newly available fourth generation of FlashCore Module (FCM) technology enables artificial intelligence capabilities within the IBM Storage FlashSystem family. FCM works with Storage Defender to provide end-to-end data resilience across primary and secondary workloads with AI-powered sensors designed for earlier notification of cyber threats to help enterprises recover faster.

IBM has announced IBM LinuxONE 4 Express, extending the latest performance, security and AI capabilities of LinuxONE to small and medium sized businesses and within new data center environments. The pre-configured rack mount system is designed to offer cost savings and to remove client guess work when spinning up workloads quickly and getting started with the platform to address new and traditional use cases such as digital assets, medical imaging with AI, and workload consolidation.

Building an integrated hybrid cloud strategy for today and years to come
As businesses move their products and services online quickly, oftentimes, they are left with a hybrid cloud environment created by default, with siloed stacks that are not conducive to alignment across businesses or the introduction of AI. In a recent IBM IBV survey, 84% of executives asked acknowledged their enterprise struggles in eliminating silo-to-silo handoffs. And 78% of responding executives said that an inadequate operating model impedes successful adoption of their multicloud platform. With the pressure to accelerate and scale the impact of data and AI across the enterprise - and improve business outcomes - another approach that organizations can take is to more carefully identify which workloads should be on-premises vs in the cloud.

It's been one year since IBM integrated Red Hat storage product roadmaps and teams into IBM Storage. In that time, organizations have been faced with unprecedented data challenges to scale AI due to the rapid growth of data in more locations and formats, but with poorer quality. Helping clients combat this problem has meant modernizing their infrastructure with cutting-edge solutions as a part of their digital transformations. Largely, this involves delivering consistent application and data storage across on-premises and cloud environments. Also, crucially, this includes helping clients adopt cloud-native architectures to realize the benefits of public cloud like cost, speed, and elasticity. Formerly Red Hat Ceph—now IBM Storage Ceph—a state-of-the-art open-source software-defined storage platform, is a keystone in this effort.

Software-defined storage (SDS) has emerged as a transformative force when it comes to data management, offering a host of advantages over traditional legacy storage arrays including extreme flexibility and scalability that are well-suited to handle modern uses cases like generative AI. With IBM Storage Ceph, storage resources are abstracted from the underlying hardware, allowing for dynamic allocation and efficient utilization of data storage. This flexibility not only simplifies management but also enhances agility in adapting to evolving business needs and scaling compute and capacity as new workloads are introduced. This self-healing and self-managing platform is designed to deliver unified file, block, and object storage services at scale on industry standard hardware. Unified storage helps provide clients a bridge from legacy applications running on independent file or block storage to a common platform that includes those and object storage in a single appliance.

IBM has announced (on January 29) that Korea Quantum Computing (KQC) has engaged IBM to offer IBM's most advanced AI software and infrastructure, as well as quantum computing services. KQC's ecosystem of users will have access to IBM's full stack solution for AI, including watsonx, an AI and data platform to train, tune and deploy advanced AI models and software for enterprises. KQC is also expanding its quantum computing collaboration with IBM. Having operated as an IBM Quantum Innovation Center since 2022, KQC will continue to offer access to IBM's global fleet of utility-scale quantum systems over the cloud. Additionally, IBM and KQC plan to deploy an IBM Quantum System Two on-site at KQC in Busan, South Korea by 2028.

"We are excited to work with KQC to deploy AI and quantum systems to drive innovation across Korean industries. With this engagement, KQC clients will have the ability to train, fine-tune, and deploy advanced AI models, using IBM watsonx and advanced AI infrastructure. Additionally, by having the opportunity to access IBM quantum systems over the cloud, today—and a next-generation quantum system in the coming years—KQC members will be able to combine the power of AI and quantum to develop new applications to address their industries' toughest problems," said Darío Gil, IBM Senior Vice President and Director of Research. This collaboration includes an investment in infrastructure to support the development and deployment of generative AI. Plans for the AI-optimized infrastructure includes advanced GPUs and IBM's Artificial Intelligence Unit (AIU), managed with Red Hat OpenShift to provide a cloud-native environment. Together, the GPU system and AIU combination is being engineered to offer members state-of-the-art hardware to power AI research and business opportunities.

IBM, at the 2023 IEEE International Electron Device Meeting (IEDM), demonstrated a concept nanosheet transistor that posts a near 100% performance improvement at the boiling point of nitrogen, of 77 Kelvin (-196 °C). Given how relatively industrialized and scaled out the manufacture, safe transport, storage, and use of liquid nitrogen is, this development potentially unlocks a new class of chips that attain top performance under liquid nitrogen cooling. Think a new generation of AI HPC accelerators that can instantly double their performance under LN2, provided a new kind of cooling solution is developed for data-centers.

Nanosheet transistors are the evolutionary next step to FinFETs, which have been driving semiconductor foundries since 16 nm, which could see their technical limits met at 3 nm. Nanosheets are expected to make their debut with 2 nm-class nodes such as the TSMC N2 and Intel 20A. At an operating temperature of 77 K, IBM's nanosheet device is claimed to offer a near doubling in performance, due to less charge carrier scattering, which results in lower power. Reducing scattering reduces resistance in the wires, letting electrons move through the device more quickly. Combined with lower power, devices can drive a higher current at a given voltage. Cooling also results in greater sensitivity between the device's on and off positions, so it takes lesser power to switch between the two states, resulting in lower power. This lower power means that transistor widths can be lowered, resulting in higher transistor densities, or smaller chips. As of now IBM is wrestling with a technical challenge concerning the transistor's threshold voltage, a voltage which is needed to create a conducting channel between the source and the drain.

The 62nd edition of the TOP500 reveals that the Frontier system retains its top spot and is still the only exascale machine on the list. However, five new or upgraded systems have shaken up the Top 10.

Housed at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) in Tennessee, USA, Frontier leads the pack with an HPL score of 1.194 EFlop/s - unchanged from the June 2023 list. Frontier utilizes AMD EPYC 64C 2GHz processors and is based on the latest HPE Cray EX235a architecture. The system has a total of 8,699,904 combined CPU and GPU cores. Additionally, Frontier has an impressive power efficiency rating of 52.59 GFlops/watt and relies on HPE's Slingshot 11 network for data transfer.

Today, IBM introduced the new IBM Storage Scale System 6000, a cloud-scale global data platform designed to meet today's data intensive and AI workload demands, and the latest offering in the IBM Storage for Data and AI portfolio.

For the seventh consecutive year and counting, IBM is a 2022 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Distributed File Systems and Object Storage Leader, recognized for its vision and execution. The new IBM Storage Scale System 6000 seeks to build on IBM's leadership position with an enhanced high performance parallel file system designed for data intensive use-cases. It provides up to 7M IOPs and up to 256 GB/s throughput for read only workloads per system in a 4U (four rack units) footprint.

The Platform for Digital and Quantum Innovation of Quebec (PINQ²), a non-profit organization (NPO) founded by the Ministry of Economy, Innovation and Energy of Quebec (MEIE - ministère de l'Économie, de l'Innovation et de l'Énergie du Québec) and the Université de Sherbrooke, along with IBM, are proud to announce the historic inauguration of an IBM Quantum System One at IBM Bromont. This event marks a major turning point in the field of information technology and all sectors of innovation in Quebec, making PINQ² the sole administrator to inaugurate and operate an IBM Quantum System One in Canada. To date, this is one of the most advanced quantum computers in IBM's global fleet of quantum computers.

This new quantum computer in Quebec reinforces Quebec's and Canada's position as a force in the rapidly advancing field of quantum computing, opening new prospects for the technological future of the province and the country. Access to this technology is a considerable asset not only for the ecosystem of DistriQ, the quantum innovation zone for Quebec, but also for the Technum Québec innovation zone, the new "Energy Transition Valley" innovation zone and other strategic sectors for Quebec.