IBM said its Spyre AI accelerator and Telum II processor are generally available, outlined a partnership with Anthropic and layered agentic AI tools throughout its offerings.
The news outlined at IBM's Tech Xchange 2025 in Orlando revolved around operationalizing AI in the enterprise. Here's a look at the notable news.
IBM Spyre Accelerator became generally available for IBM z17 will bring LLMs to IBM Z mainframe environment. IBM also said its software products including IBM watsonx Assistant for Z, AI Toolkit for IBM Z and IBM LinuxONE, and Machine Learning for IBM z/OS will use Spyre for on-prem deployments.
The Spyre Accelerator has 32 AI-optimized processing cores to support LLMs on the mainframe. Combined with IBM's Telum II processor, the company said its Z platform can process up to 450 million inference operations using multiple AI models for credit card fraud detection.
IBM said it will layer Anthropic's Claude LLMs into its software portfolio starting with its latest integrated development environment (IDE). The two companies are aiming to use Claude throughout the enterprise software development lifecycle. IBM said more than 6,000 early adopters in the company are using the new IDE, which is in preview with IBM customers.
The IDE, called Project Bob, includes tools for application modernization, code generation and review and security embedded into workflows.
IBM watsonx Orchestrate gets new tools for agentic AI including workflows that are reusable and sequence multiple AI agents, Langflow integration, a catalog of prebuilt agents for procurement, HR, finance, supply chain and sales and prebuilt customer service agents.
Watsonx Orchestrate also includes agent observability, governance and production monitoring.
IBM delivered a new release of watsonx Assistant for Z to improve the mainframe user experience with a AI chatbot grounded on Z expertise.
