A forty-five-year strategic partnership across PCs, cloud, AI, and the next generation of silicon.
By 2023, the AI infrastructure market had concentrated around one accelerator vendor and one programming model. That was acceptable for research labs. It was not acceptable for the regulated enterprise — banks, insurers, healthcare systems, and governments — who needed an alternative path that respected their data perimeter, their procurement standards, and their unwillingness to bet a decade of AI strategy on a single supplier's roadmap.
They needed an AI accelerator with serious price-for-performance, an open programming surface, and a delivery channel they already trusted. None of those things existed in a single product yet.
The first move was the foundation. In early 2023, IBM Cloud added 4th Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors to its bare metal portfolio — bringing 2× the compute density, 6× the cache performance, 1.5× the memory bandwidth, and 80 PCIe Gen 5 lanes per server. Bare metal, not virtualized: enterprise workloads got the throughput and isolation they needed for AI-adjacent analytics and HPC, on the same console they already used for everything else.
The second move was the alternative. In May 2024, IBM and Intel announced that IBM Cloud would be the first cloud service provider to offer Intel Gaudi 3 — Intel's open AI accelerator, built for inferencing and fine-tuning at scale. Gaudi 3 support extended into watsonx.ai, IBM's enterprise AI platform, so customers could run inferencing across hybrid environments without rewriting their stack.
The result was unusual: an end-to-end AI infrastructure path — silicon, accelerator, runtime, and AI platform — that was open, multi-cloud-friendly, and aligned with the procurement realities of a Fortune 500 buyer.
"By joining forces with IBM Cloud, we are unlocking new possibilities for our mutual customers to rapidly innovate and scale their AI and hybrid cloud workloads, leveraging IBM Cloud's robust cloud infrastructure."
For Intel, IBM Cloud became the first hyperscale-grade proof point for Gaudi 3 outside Intel's own developer cloud — the credibility move the product needed to enter enterprise procurement conversations on equal terms with the dominant accelerator. For IBM, Gaudi 3 fills a gap in the watsonx stack with an accelerator that respects the platform's open philosophy. For the customer, the choice that was unavailable in 2023 became available — backed by the trust both companies have built across forty-five years of joint enterprise delivery.
The same partnership that built the cloud-side proof point can be turned inward. The next chapter is IBM Consulting working with Intel directly — applying watsonx.ai, hybrid cloud, and operational AI to Intel's own enterprise functions, turning cost centers into compounding growth engines. The cloud customers that now run on Gaudi 3 are the proof. Intel's own enterprise is the next opportunity.