IBM Spyre® Accelerator and Telum II® Processor: Capturing AI value at a trusted enterprise level
Published 07 October 2025
As part of IBM z17, the IBM Spyre Accelerator paired with the Telum II processor are set to transform the way businesses leverage AI in their organizations. These groundbreaking capabilities are designed to help you scale enterprise AI workloads, enhance security and drive accelerated business value.
IBM Spyre Accelerator, generally available for IBM z17 on 28 October 2025, is set to revolutionize how organizations apply AI in their enterprises. This powerful AI accelerator is designed to bring generative AI to the IBM z17, enabling enterprises to scale up large language model (LLM) AI capabilities within the trusted envelope of IBM Z environments.
With Spyre Accelerator, clients will have the ability to use LLMs with their internal operations, integrating functions in a natural language interface such as watsonx Assistant for Z. As clients assess and build for the future, agentic AI will become a critical tool for efficiency and modernization of process flows across the data center. Similarly for business, Spyre Accelerators are engineered to help the future development of higher accuracy AI techniques, allowing for building out generative asset creation, vendor or customer data ingestion and interpretation for outreach, cross-offers, or even risk assessments, real-time.
The benefits of combining predictive and generative AI techniques to create an enterprise-level portfolio across the full spectrum of encoder, decoder and encoder-decoder AI models.
One client was very clear about the intersection of core trusted environments with enterprise-level objectives. “On-prem with Spyre Accelerator for IBM Z is important to us because this work will be related to production code,” said the Infrastructure lead at a Large European bank. “We don’t want the production workloads leaving our hands, so it is our favorite option.”
AI-driven tools can help clients quickly predict next actions needed to support a busy transaction day or incorporate recommended agents and APIs to get optimized output from a new application, accelerating the time to value for the business. According to a study from the Institute for Business Value and Oxford Economics in 2024, 61% of executives find generative AI crucial for application modernization efforts on mainframes.
As part of continuous deliveries, key software products like IBM watsonx Assistant for Z, AI Toolkit for IBM Z and IBM LinuxONE, and Machine Learning for IBM z/OS will use Spyre accelerators for full on-prem deployment. To accomplish on-prem LLM support, each Spyre Accelerator contains 32 AI-optimized processing cores to support large language models directly on the mainframe, enabling enterprises to run secured generative AI use cases on-premises. This infrastructure is designed to be scalable as PCIe-attached adapters, manageable as part of the environments already handling core data. This marks a significant milestone, allowing businesses to leverage AI at scale while keeping data on IBM Z.
IBM’s Telum II processor and Spyre Accelerator are set to revolutionize AI integration within mainframe transactions, designed to offer enhanced security, low latency and high transaction rate within the IBM Z environment. Real-time decision making has already been a game-changer with IBM z17, processing up to 450 billion inference operations per day using multiple AI models for credit card fraud detection.
With Telum II’s second-generation on-chip AI accelerator, businesses can run multiple models simultaneously, engineered for consistent low latency and high inference throughput. Spyre Accelerators add many LLM options to the table for the future, as applications start to build out deeper models to increase accuracy by highlighting new, previously unreachable insights.
“Since watsonx Assistant for Z is designed to answer questions on IBM Z and offers automation on IBM Z, we prefer deploying it end-to-end on IBM Z to continue securing the data and processes,” said an IT architect of a large European Bank.
This powerful combination will empower organizations to unlock new business value, giving them the ability to process billions of inference requests per day more accurately by reducing false positives in fraud detection and engineered to improve customer service opportunities.
AI acceleration on IBM Z, powered by the Spyre Accelerator and Telum II processor, offers unparalleled opportunities for businesses to accelerate their digital transformation. By integrating AI into mainframe operations, you can improve system management, speed recommendations for quick understanding and actions even from the newest team members and keep sensitive data secured.
The time to act is now: embrace these innovations to modernize your mainframe applications, optimize costs, and stay ahead of the competition.