Date: August 11, 2026 Main source: Reuters Link: https://www.reuters.com/business/ibm-together-ai-ink-240-million-deal-nvidia-powered-ai-inference-cluster-2026-08-11/
Summary
IBM and Together AI signed a multiyear $240 million agreement to create a large inference cluster on IBM Cloud. The infrastructure will use Nvidia HGX B300 systems, Blackwell 300 processors and Spectrum-X networking. The initial deployment covers about 2,000 Nvidia chips and will be geared toward running open models like DeepSeek, MiniMax and Kimi. Together AI expects the capacity could be reserved months in advance.
Why it matters
Inference, not just training, is becoming a large-scale infrastructure market. Companies that use AI continuously need predictable capacity, controllable prices and options to run open models without handing all their data to closed model providers. IBM is also using its enterprise position to compete for AI workloads that could end up on AWS, Azure, Google Cloud or specialized providers.
Practical implications
- For high-volume products, compare the cost of dedicated inference against per-token APIs.
- Avoid assuming that the model provider must also be the infrastructure provider.
- Prepare applications to run open models when cost per query starts to dominate the margin.