IBM launches Power11 chips and servers purpose-built to simplify enterprise AI deployment and reduce infrastructure overhead.

International Business Machines announced a new line of Power11 chips and servers on Tuesday, marking the company's first major update to its "Power" line of chips since 2020. These chips have traditionally competed against offerings from Intel and Advanced Micro Devices in data centers, particularly in specialized sectors such as financial services, manufacturing, and healthcare. The Armonk, New York-based company is positioning the Power11 systems as an integrated package of chips and software, similar to Nvidia's AI servers approach.

Tom McPherson, general manager of Power systems at IBM, explained that the company used tight coupling between hardware and software to focus on reliability and security. The Power11 systems, available from July 25, will not require any planned downtime for software updates. Their unplanned downtime averages just over 30 seconds each year, and they are designed to detect and respond within a minute to ransomware attacks—where hackers encrypt data and attempt to extract a ransom in exchange for the keys.

IBM plans to integrate Power11 with Spyre, its AI chip introduced last year, by the fourth quarter of this year. McPherson emphasized that IBM does not aim to compete with Nvidia in helping create and train AI systems, but is instead focused on simplifying AI deployment for inference—the process of putting an AI system to work in speeding up business tasks. "We can integrate AI capabilities seamlessly into this for inference acceleration and help their business process improvements," McPherson said. "It's not going to have all the horsepower for training or anything, but it's going to have really good inferencing capabilities that are simple to integrate."