Monday, April 28th 2025
IBM Unveils $150 Billion Investment in America to Accelerate Technology Opportunity
Today IBM announced plans to invest $150 billion in America over the next five years to fuel the economy and to accelerate its role as the global leader in computing. This includes an investment of more than $30 billion in research and development to advance and continue IBM's American manufacturing of mainframe and quantum computers.
"Technology doesn't just build the future—it defines it," said Arvind Krishna, IBM chairman, president and chief executive officer. "We have been focused on American jobs and manufacturing since our founding 114 years ago, and with this investment and manufacturing commitment we are ensuring that IBM remains the epicenter of the world's most advanced computing and AI capabilities."
IBM is one of the nation's largest technology employers and has ushered in innovations that include the data processing systems that enabled the U.S. social security system, the Apollo Program that put a man on the moon, and power businesses in every industry.
That legacy continues in Poughkeepsie, New York, where we manufacture the cutting-edge mainframes that are the technology backbone of the American and global economies. More than 70% of the entire world's transactions by value run through the IBM mainframes that are manufactured right here in America.
IBM also operates the world's largest fleet of quantum computer systems, and will continue to design, build and assemble quantum computers in America. Quantum computing represents one of the biggest technology platform shifts and economic opportunities in decades and will solve problems that today's conventional computers cannot solve. Enabling these solutions will not only help us better understand the fundamentals of how the world works but are projected to transform American competitiveness, jobs, and national security. IBM's Quantum Network provides access to IBM's quantum systems for nearly 300 Fortune 500 companies, academic institutions, national laboratories, and startups and is accessed by over 600,000 active users.
Today's announcement reaffirms IBM's unwavering commitment to the future of American innovation, igniting new economic opportunity in the United States and around the world.
Source:
IBM
"Technology doesn't just build the future—it defines it," said Arvind Krishna, IBM chairman, president and chief executive officer. "We have been focused on American jobs and manufacturing since our founding 114 years ago, and with this investment and manufacturing commitment we are ensuring that IBM remains the epicenter of the world's most advanced computing and AI capabilities."
That legacy continues in Poughkeepsie, New York, where we manufacture the cutting-edge mainframes that are the technology backbone of the American and global economies. More than 70% of the entire world's transactions by value run through the IBM mainframes that are manufactured right here in America.
IBM also operates the world's largest fleet of quantum computer systems, and will continue to design, build and assemble quantum computers in America. Quantum computing represents one of the biggest technology platform shifts and economic opportunities in decades and will solve problems that today's conventional computers cannot solve. Enabling these solutions will not only help us better understand the fundamentals of how the world works but are projected to transform American competitiveness, jobs, and national security. IBM's Quantum Network provides access to IBM's quantum systems for nearly 300 Fortune 500 companies, academic institutions, national laboratories, and startups and is accessed by over 600,000 active users.
Today's announcement reaffirms IBM's unwavering commitment to the future of American innovation, igniting new economic opportunity in the United States and around the world.
19 Comments on IBM Unveils $150 Billion Investment in America to Accelerate Technology Opportunity
But anyways, nice to see some MORE investments in the US mfgr'ing base...
Like the ability to take out a CPU and service / upgrade / replace it, while the system was running. For all practical purposes, they had VMs. They could move compute to a different set of hardware to facilitate the changes with zero downtime.
This kind of capability wasn't really available in the Unix space until the 2000s, and even today typical hyperconverged VM infrastructure is not as robust as even old IBM systems. There are a few exceptions ofc, specifically Tandem (later HP) NonStop, which were designed for the always on space.
IBM testing. They also hit them with radiation to simulate cosmic rays, and the memory is configured in RAIM - similar to RAID.
I'm willing to bet they're probably going to get thrice that amount in return, not to mention quite a few kickbacks from the government.
Their calculation can only work out with huge loans (and huge inflation too).Since "ever", as far as I know.
There were times when Oracle wouldn't sell per-core licences for just some of the cores on the PC architecture. They considered it incapable of real, hardware-based virtualisation, and unable to assure that their databases would only run on the licensed cores. The customer had to buy licences for all cores in the system. This wasn't an issue with IBM z.
So for the people who are questioning where the 150B is going to come from -
Prior to 2018 IBM was doing about 5B per quarter in capital investments, that's 20B / year. Over 5 years it would be 100B.
Since 2018 they ramped down to about 2B/quarter, or 8B / year. Over 5 years that would be 40B. This is already baked into their current earnings numbers. Keeping investment down is probably how they built their current cash \ investment pile of over 82B.
Ramping back up to 30B/year is likely just making up for the past 6 years. A good deal of this will be paid for by cash flow from operations, as it always has been.
The amount of cash from operation they can push towards capital investment will go up all else being equal, because capital investment is tax deductible. If they balanced it perfectly to have no taxable income, they could probably do well over 20B / year without selling any investments or getting any loans.
So 30B / year for 5 years is in no way a stretch.
Sorry, it's an old habit from back in my data entry days, where I was paid by the time it took to enter stuff into a database/spreadsheet/letter/booklet etc, so I imagine, if you can, the difference in the number of characters I gained by NOT typing those 4 extra characters.... over the course of 500-1000 paragraphs :)