International Business Machines

IBM expanded its AI and digital infrastructure push on 1 October 2026 by adding private equity executive Frank Baker to its board and rolling out self-hosted deployment for its IBM Bob agentic software development platform across on-premises, private, sovereign, and air-gapped environments. The move lets enterprises run IBM Bob and Digital Asset Haven entirely within their own infrastructure, sharpening IBM's appeal to highly regulated clients that need tight control over data residency, security policies, and digital asset operations. The on-premises beta for IBM Digital Asset Haven on IBM Z and LinuxONE keeps sensitive digital asset workflows, keys and compliance controls inside client data centers while still using the same APIs as its SaaS offering. IBM's narrative projects $78.2 billion in revenue and $11.9 billion in earnings by 2029, requiring 4.2% yearly revenue growth and about a $1.2 billion earnings increase from $10.7 billion today, with a $240.59 fair value implying 7% upside. The company still faces the near-term catalyst of monetizing its US$24.6 billion of ARR and the key risk from an ongoing securities law investigation.

Shares of IT consulting and business-services firms rallied after Accenture reported stronger-than-expected results and an above-consensus fiscal 2027 outlook. Accenture guided fiscal 2027 revenue growth of 3%–6% following a Q4 revenue beat of roughly $18.7B, easing fears that AI would hollow out traditional consulting and outsourcing demand. The read-across lifted EPAM 6.8%, DXC 5.7%, Everforth 11.7%, EXL 6.2%, and Grid Dynamics 8%, with Cognizant, IBM, Salesforce, and Indian IT ADRs Infosys and Wipro also gaining. Separately, IBM announced a self-hosted deployment option for IBM Bob aimed at enterprise AI sovereignty and governance, letting enterprises run AI-driven software delivery and modernization inside customer-controlled environments including on-premises, sovereign clouds, private clouds, and air-gapped setups. IBM also expanded its IBM Bob Premium Package for Z with that self-hosted capability and deeper application intelligence tools, targeting mainframe modernization under strict compliance and data-sovereignty standards.

IBM announced a self-hosted deployment option for IBM Bob, its agentic software development platform, sending shares up 5.7% in the morning session. The self-hosted deployment lets enterprises run AI-driven software delivery and modernization inside customer-controlled environments, including on-premises systems, sovereign clouds, private clouds, and air-gapped environments, as IBM aims to advance enterprise artificial intelligence sovereignty and governance. IBM also expanded its IBM Bob Premium Package for Z to incorporate the self-hosted capability along with deeper application intelligence tools, enhancements the company says are designed to modernize mission-critical mainframe workloads while meeting strict compliance and data sovereignty standards. After the initial pop, the shares cooled to $228.88, up 4.1% from the previous close. IBM is down 21.5% since the beginning of the year and trades 30.5% below its 52-week high of $329.23 from June 2026.

IBM confirmed Thursday that its agentic software-development platform, IBM Bob, is now available for on-premises, private-cloud, sovereign-cloud and even air-gapped environments, letting sensitive source code, application context and development artifacts stay inside customer-controlled infrastructure rather than being sent to an external AI service. The company cited an IBM Institute for Business Value study from June 2026 in which 68% of surveyed executives said meeting data-residency and sovereignty requirements across geographies was challenging. IBM said in its second-quarter results in July that its Red Hat, watsonx and HashiCorp businesses were benefiting as customers moved from AI experimentation toward enterprise-scale deployment, and that Power and Storage had built an order backlog of nearly $500 million. IBM generated $17.2 billion in second-quarter revenue, with software growing 5% year over year to $7.8 billion, and it expects 2026 constant-currency revenue growth of 4% to 5%. The new Bob offering still supports hybrid configurations, including connections to external model services, but IBM is making deployment location part of the product rather than treating the public cloud as the default.

IBM outlined how its products will work with Nvidia's new AI-agent safety platform, sending the hybrid-cloud and enterprise-software company's shares up about 0.4% to $221.49 around 10:18 a.m. ET Tuesday. Under the plan, IBM's Agent Identity and HashiCorp Vault connect to Nvidia OpenShell to manage credentials and permissions, while Identity Protection tracks agents across an organization. IBM Fusion adds BlueField-4 hardware and Red Hat OpenShift provides a place to run agents across hybrid-cloud systems, and Nvidia's platform also includes Sentry, which monitors agent behavior and can quarantine an agent that crosses its limits. IBM disclosed no contract value or revenue target for the collaboration, leaving investors to weigh whether customers will pay for the combination at scale. The article first appeared on GuruFocus.

International Business Machines introduced an on-premises version of its Digital Asset Haven platform for regulated institutions, letting banks and other supervised entities run the platform inside their own data centers using existing controls. The beta deployment runs on IBM Z and LinuxONE, keeping digital asset keys, workflows, and compliance controls within existing environments, and includes an ISO 20022 adapter and Swift ledger connectivity. Separately, IBM and Anderon LLC reported operational production of quantum wafers, a manufacturing milestone for quantum hardware in the US tied to a CHIPS Act backed facility. Investors will watch how many regulated institutions move from pilot to production on the on-premises beta and Swift shared ledger integration through 2027, and whether Anderon's quantum wafers progress from initial runs to volume orders once that facility ramps.

IBM announced on September 24 two new capabilities for its Digital Asset Haven platform, aimed at tier-one financial institutions, governments, and regulated entities. In a new beta rollout, clients can connect to SWIFT's blockchain-based shared ledger, linking into a cooperative network of over 12,500 financial institutions across 150+ countries, and can process 24/7 tokenized deposit transactions through the ISO 20022 Messaging Adapter using familiar messaging workflows. IBM also introduced an on-premises beta deployment option for Digital Asset Haven on IBM Z and LinuxONE servers, letting institutions orchestrate assets such as stablecoins and tokenized deposits entirely within their private data centers. The company's software base generated $7.8 billion in revenue in Q2 2026, up 5%, with Red Hat up 11% and Data up 19%, while its distributed infrastructure sub-segment grew 37% in Q2 and built a backlog near $500 million. IBM ended Q2 with $62.0 billion in total debt against $8.2 billion in cash, restricted cash, and marketable securities after spending $10.5 billion on acquisitions year-to-date, and total Infrastructure revenue fell 7% in Q2 to $3.8 billion as IBM Z mainframe revenue dropped 42% in a cyclical trough.

International Business Machines Corporation and Lockheed Martin Corporation have established a quantum innovation hub at ETH Zurich through an offset agreement with armasuisse, Switzerland's Federal Office for Defence Procurement. The initiative will host Switzerland's first IBM Quantum System Two, powered by IBM's advanced Quantum Nighthawk processor, at the Swiss National Supercomputing Center in Lugano. Operating the facility alongside ETH Zurich, the collaboration bridges IBM's expertise in quantum computing and AI with Lockheed Martin's focus on quantum sensing and additive manufacturing. For both tech and defense investors, the hub reinforces a shared commitment to developing next-generation compute capabilities for complex industrial and national security applications. The joint Swiss initiative offers a clear strategic catalyst for both companies, though its near-term financial impact remains conditional.

International Business Machines Corporation has strengthened its decades-long partnership with Marist University through an Innovation Incubator focused on artificial intelligence research, enterprise computing and student career readiness. The program will use the IBM z17 mainframe to support initial projects in AI, business, finance and civic engagement, including autonomous AI agents in controlled marketing campaigns, quantum optimization algorithms for analyzing real-time financial data and improving portfolio allocations, and ways AI can improve polling methods, survey design and models of voter participation. IBM experts will work with Marist students and faculty on research addressing business, societal and community challenges, with applications extending into business, communications, political science and environmental studies. IBM faces competition from Microsoft Corporation, which is advancing AI through its Copilot products and intelligent agents, and from Alphabet Inc., which is expanding AI through new Gemini models used in healthcare, weather forecasting, education and scientific research. IBM shares have lost 13% over the past year against the industry's growth of 212.1%, and the stock trades at a forward price-to-sales ratio of 3.02 versus the industry average of 5.29. Earnings estimates for 2026 have declined 0.1% to $12.33 over the past 60 days, while estimates for 2027 have decreased 0.2% to $13.22, and IBM currently carries a Zacks Rank #4 (Sell).

IBM has placed its z17 mainframe at Marist University's new Innovation Incubator, sending shares up about 2.2% to $236.55 Wednesday morning from Tuesday's $231.38 close. Marist plans to test autonomous marketing agents and explore AI applications in polling, and researchers are also scoping a project that would use quantum optimization to build portfolio allocations. IBM provided the machine for students and faculty to develop and test applications, and its announcement gives no dollar value for the system or revenue forecast for the collaboration. The stock still sat 2.59% below its $242.84 GF Value estimate, a gap that gives investors a valuation reference but that the campus project alone does not close. The investor case here takes patience, since getting future developers comfortable with IBM's technology could pay off if their work reaches enterprise customers, but the z17 at Marist shows where IBM wants its platform used rather than what customers will pay for the applications that emerge.

The Hashgraph Group, or THG, announced that its IDTrust self-sovereign identity platform has been validated and officially listed on the IBM Cloud Catalog, making it among the first commercial Hedera-powered enterprise applications directly purchasable as a SaaS product through a major cloud marketplace. THG also qualified for IBM Silver Partner status and signed a global Embedded Solution Agreement with IBM covering Cloud and AI technology, a licensing and partnership agreement that lets technology partners integrate IBM technology into their own proprietary products to sell a complete, single-branded solution. IDTrust is a decentralized self-sovereign identity platform with enterprise-grade cryptography for AI agents, devices, and humans, already deployed with a leading European telecoms operator to power verified caller identity, and it provides decentralized identifiers and verifiable credentials built on open W3C standards and designed to support the EU eIDAS 2.0 framework. The listing comes as Gartner projects that 40% of enterprise applications will embed task-specific AI agents by the end of 2026, up from less than 5% in 2025, and as Know Your Agent moves from a theoretical concern to an enterprise priority. For Hedera Hashgraph, the listing represents a significant distribution milestone, since IBM has been a member of the Hedera Governing Council since 2019 and enterprise clients can now purchase Hedera-anchored identity infrastructure through existing IBM consumption commitments.

International Business Machines and NASA have released an open Lunar Foundation Model for scientific lunar research to the public, while IBM, Lockheed Martin and ETH Zurich have created a quantum innovation hub to broaden access to quantum computing research and training. The ETH Zurich quantum hub is intended to support industrial use cases in areas such as materials science, financial services and aerospace. International Business Machines is a US IT group with a US$216.3b market cap that sells integrated hardware, software and services, and its work with NASA and the ETH Zurich quantum hub taps into areas where large research and enterprise clients already use its infrastructure and consulting capabilities. The clearest test of the bull case will come as IBM reports how many paying industrial and research workloads actually run on Quantum System Two and related services at ETH Zurich once that system is deployed, and whether management starts breaking out any quantum or lunar AI related revenue or backlog in future quarterly updates. The bear case centers on execution risk in turning complex research collaborations into scalable, high margin Software and Consulting revenue rather than isolated projects.

IBM raised its quarterly dividend by a single penny, from $1.68 to $1.69, in a declaration dated April 22, 2026, marking its 31st consecutive year of increases but adding only about four cents to the annualized payout. The one-cent step continues a run of five straight penny bumps, a sharp slowdown from 2015, when the quarterly payout rose from $1.10 to $1.30. IBM's dividend remains well covered: the company produced $14.73 billion in free cash flow in 2025 against a payout of $6.255 billion, and CFO Jim Kavanaugh told analysts on the Q2 call that IBM returned $3.2 billion to shareholders in dividends through the first half of the year. The cash is increasingly being redirected toward acquisitions of Confluent and HashiCorp, $62 billion in debt, and more than $10 billion committed to quantum computing over five years, while CEO Arvind Krishna pointed to a generative AI book of business exceeding $12.5 billion. IBM offers the highest yield among its peers at 2.83% but the slowest growth, trailing Microsoft, which pushed its quarterly dividend from $0.91 to $0.98 in September on a run from $0.13 in 2010, as well as Cisco Systems and Oracle. With IBM shares down 20.71% year to date at $230.17, the total-return case now rests on the AI reinvestment thesis rather than dividend growth.

International Business Machines said its subsidiary Anderon won a US$1b federal award to build a U.S. quantum chip foundry, alongside a further US$1b IBM commitment to the project. The planned facility is described as the first stand-alone quantum wafer foundry in the U.S., focused on quantum chip manufacturing under CHIPS Act funding. IBM also announced a partnership with regulatory intelligence provider CUBE to integrate real time global AI rule monitoring into watsonx.governance. The Anderon quantum foundry award and CUBE tie up together represent a US$2b quantum and governance push by the company.

Dun & Bradstreet announced that the D&B Commercial Graph is now available in the IBM watsonx Orchestrate Agent Catalog through a Model Context Protocol server. The integration connects AI agents to verified business identity, relationships, and commercial context, anchored by the D-U-N-S Number business identifier, so agents recognize the same business across systems, workflows, and domains. Elizabeth Barrette, General Manager for Master Data Management Solutions at Dun & Bradstreet, said the company's recent AI Momentum survey found just 6% of businesses say their enterprise data is fully ready to support AI at scale. Megan Grant, Managing Director at IBM Technology, U.S. Industry Market, said the arrangement lets organizations bring trusted data and business context into the AI workflows they build and deploy. The D&B Commercial Graph MCP Server is available through the IBM watsonx Orchestrate Agent Catalog, supporting workflows across sales, marketing, procurement, compliance, finance, credit evaluation, and master data management.

Anderon, an IBM subsidiary, finalized a $1 billion research-and-development award from the U.S. Department of Commerce on Wednesday under the 2022 CHIPS and Science Act. The funding will support Anderon's efforts to advance quantum wafer manufacturing at its facility in Albany, New York, where a 300-millimeter quantum wafer foundry serves customers across the quantum industry. IBM has put up $1 billion of its own money alongside the federal award, and production is underway with quantum wafers already in process. The Anderon award is part of a broader $2 billion package distributed across nine quantum computing companies under the CHIPS and Science Act, with GlobalFoundries in line for $375 million and D-Wave Quantum, Rigetti Computing, and Infleqtion each expected to receive $100 million; each of the nine firms will give the federal government a minority ownership stake in exchange for the funding. The finalization follows a letter of intent between IBM and the Commerce Department announced in May, and last week Rigetti Computing, D-Wave Quantum, and Quantinuum each finalized $100 million deals with the department. IBM stock fell 3.3% on Wednesday and has declined nearly 19% this year.

CUBE, the AI-native regulatory intelligence company, announced a collaboration with IBM to add a new Regulatory Horizon Scanning capability within IBM watsonx.governance. The integration embeds CUBE's global regulatory intelligence directly into watsonx.governance, giving enterprises continuous visibility into regulatory developments affecting their AI systems worldwide. The capability continuously monitors AI-related regulatory developments from authoritative sources, automatically capturing updates from regulators, legislative bodies, standards organisations and industry associations, and making them available within existing AI governance workflows. The collaboration follows partnerships CUBE announced earlier this year with Microsoft and ServiceNow, and comes as requirements emerge across jurisdictions ranging from the EU's AI Act to the NIST AI Risk Management Framework. Ben Richmond, Founder and CEO of CUBE, said regulatory intelligence is becoming a foundational layer of how AI itself is governed, while Maryam Ashoori, VP of watsonx.governance Product and Engineering at IBM, said CUBE brings a depth of regulatory expertise and global reach few providers can match.

IBM expanded its relationship with Turkey's Kredi Kayıt Bürosu on Monday, pushing watsonx and IBM infrastructure deeper into a financial platform operating at enormous scale. KKB plans to deploy IBM data, mainframe and watsonx technologies as it modernizes infrastructure capable of handling more than 8.5 billion transactions annually, a workload that works out to roughly 23.3 million transactions every day. The project spans software-development acceleration, system monitoring, database management and API integration, putting IBM technology directly into a mission-critical financial workload. IBM did not disclose the contract value or a deployment timetable, while second-quarter company revenue increased just 1% to $17.2 billion. IBM shares slipped approximately 0.4% to $248.07 Tuesday morning, a price only 2.23% above the $242.67 GF Value estimate.

Four major infrastructure vendors have now shipped standalone agent governance products at general availability, a rush that has itself become the signal that agent governance is decoupling from individual platforms to become a category of its own. Okta pushed furthest into new territory with its July 2026 product innovations, shipping Agent-to-Agent Connections at general availability to enable secure multi-agent workflows through temporary runtime tokens that enforce which agents may invoke which others, alongside the Agent Gateway, available as a research release, which sits between agents and the systems they access without requiring code changes. IBM's Think 2026 announcement positioned next-generation watsonx Orchestrate as an agentic control plane, introduced in June on AWS and IBM Cloud, offering runtime policy management, credential health monitoring, and an Agent Access overview across an organization's entire agent estate. Broadcom embedded governance directly into the compute fabric with AgentMinder, unveiled at VMware Explore on August 31 and shipping at general availability bundled into the VMware Private AI Cloud, treating agents as enterprise-grade identities bound to a declared mission, permitted intents, approved tools, and authorized resources. Dataiku made a different architectural bet, with Dataiku Agent Management scanning agents across nine platforms including Microsoft Copilot Studio, Salesforce Agentforce, AWS Bedrock, and Google Vertex to provide a cross-platform control tower for discovery, certification, and audit-readiness. The urgency tracks to two numbers: Menlo Ventures found that 76 percent of AI applications are purchased rather than built internally, and the Cloud Security Alliance reported in February that 84 percent of organizations doubt they could pass a compliance audit focused on agent behavior or access controls.

BlueQubit announced the open call for its Quantum Flywheel grant program, a $150,000 initiative created with support from IBM, Amazon Web Services, and NVIDIA accelerated computing. The three-month program provides research teams with cloud compute credits for QPU, CPU, and GPU resources, along with access to frontier AI models and BlueQubit's quantum-native development environment. Proposals are invited across three areas: developing and testing novel quantum algorithms on IBM quantum computers targeting quantum advantage in simulation and optimization, conducting adversarial classical simulation with tensor networks and Pauli-path methods to stress-test published quantum advantage claims, and using frontier AI agents to discover, decode, and evaluate novel quantum error-correction codes aimed at mitigating hardware noise. Selected teams will receive direct access to high-performance classical supercomputing, including NVIDIA GPU instances on AWS and large core CPU machines via BlueQubit's simulation platform, with end-to-end support from code generation to QPU execution on IBM quantum computers. The open call runs for a five-week submission window, and selected researchers will receive three months of continuous hardware and compute access.

IBM launched an open-source Lunar Foundation Model with NASA, sending its shares up about 2% to $238.62 on Friday. The model was built from more than 30 data layers gathered by nine instruments across four NASA missions, and it can flag potential ice deposits, chart craters for safer landings and examine volcanic terrain. Benchmark testing showed accuracy gains of as much as 23% over commonly used techniques, giving IBM a powerful showcase for applying AI to complex scientific data. Open sourcing the lunar model will not generate meaningful licensing revenue by itself; the bigger prize is proving IBM can turn enormous datasets into specialized AI systems and then sell the computing infrastructure, software and consulting expertise needed to deploy them on Earth. IBM trades 1.64% below its GF Value estimate of $242.59, suggesting modest upside rather than a deep discount.

Atsuyoshi Koike, chairman and CEO of Japanese chipmaker Rapidus Corp, said on Thursday, September 10, that he is seriously considering building a semiconductor manufacturing plant on the Moon by 2040, citing the Moon's water resources as necessary for chip production. Speaking at a forum in Washington hosted by the Hudson Institute, Koike confirmed this is no joke and that he is thinking of a timeframe around 2040, and he showed attendees an AI-generated video depicting a simulated manufacturing plant on the lunar surface. Meanwhile, Arvind Krishna, CEO of IBM Corp, who also attended the event, said IBM is providing technical support to Rapidus as the Japanese company prepares to mass-produce 2-nanometer semiconductors at its plant in Hokkaido, and the two companies are also jointly researching and developing even more advanced 1-nanometer semiconductors.

IBM and NASA announced the open-source release of the NASA-IBM Lunar Foundation Model, one of the first publicly available foundation models for scientific exploration of the Moon. The model exceeds widely used methods by up to 23% in identifying key geographic features on the Moon's surface, including potential ice deposits, craters and volcanic formations. A NASA-IBM authored technical paper shows the model reduced error in identifying areas with high potential for lunar ice by up to 22% compared to the SwinV2-B (ImageNet) model, and at context-scale resolution of roughly 100 meters it outperforms SwinV2-B by nearly 19% using just half the training data. Alongside the model, IBM and NASA scientists built the first open-source lunar dataset of its kind, aggregating over 30 spatially-aligned layers from nine instruments across four missions, including data from NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter and GRAIL mission and complementary data from the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency's SELENE/Kaguya. The release extends the IBM and NASA collaboration and joins the Prithvi family of open foundation models spanning geospatial, weather, heliophysics and now the Moon.

IBM and Lockheed Martin, through an offset agreement with armasuisse, Switzerland's Federal Office for Defence Procurement, established a hub for quantum innovation at ETH Zurich that will host the country's first IBM Quantum System Two at the Swiss National Supercomputing Center in Lugano. IBM will operate the system, which will be powered by an IBM Quantum Nighthawk, the company's most advanced processor, with deployment expected by the end of 2026. ETH Zurich will provide expertise, resources and technologies for Swiss industries, startups and academia, including access to the quantum computer, and organizations joining the hub will also have immediate access to IBM's fleet of quantum computers available over the cloud. The collaboration includes two planned joint development projects between IBM and Lockheed Martin exploring quantum sensing applications for navigation and the improvement of additive manufacturing of metallic alloys. The initiative builds on a long-standing IBM and ETH Zurich relationship, including a recently launched 10-year effort to advance foundational algorithmic research, and includes quantum education and workforce development through the IBM Quantum Network and IBM Quantum Platform learning offerings.

International Business Machines, the enterprise-software and infrastructure provider, added LTM as a deployment partner for its Lightwell AI security platform on Wednesday, while its shares slipped about 0.2% to $231.48. IBM committed $5 billion earlier this year to Lightwell and related open-source security initiatives, a sum roughly equal to 61% of its $8.2 billion cash balance at the end of the second quarter, though spending will occur over time. The platform, which uses AI agents to find vulnerabilities and generate patches, produced 7,500 patches in its first two weeks, and LTM will provide integration, validation, and DevSecOps support for enterprise customers. IBM's quarterly software revenue rose 5% to $7.8 billion, while infrastructure revenue fell 7%, and its share price sits 4.56% below its GF Value estimate of $242.54, leaving Lightwell to convert its promise into recurring growth as legacy infrastructure declines.

LTM, the Business Creativity partner to the world's largest enterprises, announced a collaboration with IBM and Red Hat on Lightwell, an AI-driven solution to help enterprises safeguard the open-source software supply chain through vulnerability remediation. Lightwell delivers validated fixes for production environments, moving beyond detection to scalable remediation. LTM, an IBM Platinum Partner, will offer services including remediation strategy, dependency analysis, risk-based prioritization, program management, DevSecOps integration, testing, and deployment support. The collaboration aims to help organizations address security challenges across complex open-source ecosystems, with LTM's expertise in application modernization, cloud, cybersecurity, and DevSecOps. Executives from LTM, IBM, and Red Hat emphasized the need for collective defense and expert ecosystems to accelerate patch delivery and prevent zero-day exploits.

A joint team from Cleveland Clinic, RIKEN, and IBM has been named a finalist for the 2026 ACM Gordon Bell Prize for simulating the largest biologically meaningful molecules ever modeled with quantum computers, reaching a scale of 12,635 atoms. The team combined quantum and classical computing methods in a framework called quantum-centric supercomputing, using IBM Quantum Heron processors at Cleveland Clinic and RIKEN alongside two of the world's most powerful supercomputers, Fugaku and Miyabi-G. The quantum computers used up to 94 qubits to run nearly 6,000 quantum operations, while the supercomputers reassembled results to provide a complete representation of each molecule. The work, initially published in May 2026, reported the first-known simulation of a 303-atom protein, and subsequent updates scaled the method roughly 40 times with a 210-fold improvement in accuracy. The winner will be announced at SC26 in Chicago from November 15–20, 2026.

D-Wave Quantum, Rigetti Computing, and Quantinuum each finalized definitive agreements with the U.S. Department of Commerce on Tuesday for $100 million apiece in CHIPS and Science Act funding, with the federal government taking a minority, non-controlling equity stake in each company as a condition of the grants. The three deals total $300 million and are structured as research-and-development grants under the CHIPS Act. Shares of all three companies rose in premarket trading, with Rigetti up 7.4% to $16.33, D-Wave up 5.4% to $17.48, and Quantinuum up 3.9% to $51.56. D-Wave will use its award to develop a 100,000-qubit annealing system and a 10,000-qubit gate-model system capable of 100 logical qubits. Rigetti will pursue three R&D projects focused on miniaturized readout electronics, a new cryostat architecture, and high-connectivity chip fabrication. Quantinuum will support R&D and domestic quantum semiconductor manufacturing, partnering with GlobalFoundries on 300mm wafer fabrication and with Monarch Quantum on lasers and optical components. These three deals are part of a broader federal effort to award $2 billion across nine quantum computing companies, with IBM receiving the largest share at $1 billion for a quantum chip foundry in Albany, New York.

IBM Ventures has invested in BQP, the physics acceleration company, bringing its total funding to $8 million and backing the expansion of its BQPhy platform from engineering design into real-time operational decisions. The investment extends a technical relationship that began in 2023 when BQP joined the IBM Quantum Network. BQP's flagship platform, BQPhy, is in production with aerospace and defense customers, and the company has grown contracted and committed revenue eightfold since its 2025 seed round, tripling its customer base and growing platform users twentyfold. The investment also includes participation from Venn10 Capital and existing investor Monta Vista Capital. BQP's technology addresses the inefficiency of classical solvers, which leave roughly 85% of a GPU's floating-point capacity idle, by using that capacity to resolve full-fidelity physics within operational decision windows.

The LTO Program Technology Provider Companies—Hewlett Packard Enterprise, IBM, and Quantum—reported that tape media capacity shipments rose 57% year-over-year in Q1 2026, driven by AI and archive demand. The growth reflects strong LTO-9 shipments and the early ramp of LTO-10, with a new 40 TB native-capacity cartridge also contributing. Annual shipments in 2025 totaled 160.3 exabytes, down 9% from the record 176.5 exabytes in 2024, but still the second-highest ever. Quantum CEO Hugues Meyrath cited unprecedented data growth and cost, energy, and cyber resilience pressures, while analyst Tom Coughlin noted cautious purchasing due to trade uncertainty. The LTO Program anticipates another record-setting year in 2026.

The European Union on Tuesday awarded French state-owned computer company Bull a contract worth 387.78 million euros ($449.4 million) to build an artificial intelligence supercomputer. This is Bull's largest order ever and part of the EU's efforts to expand computing capacity and narrow the gap with the United States and China. The contract comes months after the French government spun off Bull from debt-laden Atos. According to officials at the European High Performance Computing Joint Undertaking (EuroHPC), demand for AI computing resources exceeds available capacity. EuroHPC selected Bull as the sixth system ordered under its AI Factory program. The new system, named LUMI-AI, will be co-located with the existing supercomputer LUMI in Finland and is expected to become operational in the second half of 2027. This order further expands the network that EuroHPC has been building for years. With a total budget of 8.2 billion euros through 2027, EuroHPC has established 19 AI factories centered on 12 supercomputers, with plans for further expansion. Evangelos Floros, head of infrastructure at EuroHPC, told reporters, "At present, we cannot meet all demand and have to turn down some applications." He expressed hope that the capacity shortfall would be alleviated as additional systems come online in the second half of this year and beyond. Floros noted that EuroHPC's network has become a key foundation for AI development in Europe, with AI factories adding systems specialized for AI training and applications. Bull will use AI chips from AMD, a major competitor to U.S. chip giant Nvidia, and integrate storage technology from IBM and network technology from Nokia. EuroHPC systems are already being used by European AI developers. French cloud services company OVHcloud told Reuters it has completed initial training of a foundation model using Jupiter, a supercomputer EuroHPC is building in Germany. In addition, Italian startup Domino, which leads the EU-backed EUROPA consortium, is also using EuroHPC infrastructure to train its own models.

IBM has completed its acquisition of HRL Laboratories, strengthening its position in quantum computing and related advanced technologies. The deal adds expertise in quantum sensing, materials science, electronics, and manufacturing, and supports IBM's efforts to develop scalable quantum systems. IBM will integrate HRL's silicon-spin qubit expertise, complementing its superconducting approach, and leverage HRL's capabilities in quantum materials, cryogenics, control electronics, packaging, and interconnect technologies. The acquisition also supports IBM's quantum manufacturing and infrastructure investments, potentially enabling collaboration with Anderon, its pure-play quantum wafer foundry. IBM expects its Quantum Starling system to perform 100 million quantum operations by 2029, followed by Blue Jay in the mid-2030s. IBM faces competition from Microsoft and Alphabet, which are advancing their own quantum initiatives. IBM shares have lost 3.3% over the past year, and earnings estimates for 2026 and 2027 have been slightly reduced.

The global UNIX market is projected to grow from $3.28 billion in 2025 to $3.36 billion in 2026, a compound annual growth rate of 2.3%, and reach $3.7 billion by 2030, according to a new report from ResearchAndMarkets.com. Growth is driven by digital transformation, data center expansion, and rising cybersecurity threats, with trends including hybrid cloud adoption, high-performance computing, and containerization. North America led the market in 2025, while Asia-Pacific is expected to be the fastest-growing region. The report profiles key players such as IBM, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, and Oracle, and covers segments including hardware, software, and services.

IBM has introduced its next-generation dual-architecture processor for IBM Z and LinuxONE systems, marking the first hardware milestone from its partnership with Arm Holdings announced in April. The chip, built on a 2-nanometer process, features 11 high-performance cores running above 5.7 GHz, AI inference accelerators for fraud detection, and enhanced security features. This collaboration aims to expand IBM's mainframe software ecosystem by supporting Arm workloads, while giving Arm a foothold in enterprise computing. Both companies have seen increased hedge fund interest, with IBM's hedge fund holders rising from 59 to 74 and Arm's from 46 to 52 in the second quarter. The success of this venture hinges on customer adoption of Arm workloads on mainframes, a key point to watch in upcoming earnings calls.