IBM Cloud announces new collaborations and offerings to fuel AI transformation and address evolving regulatory landscape

At IBM, we’ve witnessed how a hybrid cloud approach can significantly support AI, security and compliance for global enterprises by offering flexibility, control and scalability across different environments. Every day, we’re working with clients to be more intentional about their hybrid cloud strategies to drive true transformation—a methodology that we call “hybrid by design.” This approach involves enterprises making deliberate workload placement decisions based on resiliency, performance, security, regulatory compliance and total cost of ownership.

In the first half of 2025, IBM Cloud announced several new collaborations and offerings to support clients on their hybrid-by-design modernization journey and to support their needs for the evolving regulatory landscape. Here is what you need to know.

As enterprises prioritize AI transformation, many are realizing that high-performance infrastructure is crucial to accelerating innovation, especially for enabling generative AI adoption across business processes. Enterprises are also factoring in overall cost-effectiveness when considering GPU and accelerator adoption for their workloads.

To address this market demand, IBM is expanding its GPU and accelerator partnerships to support compute-intensive AI workloads. The AMD Instinct™ MI300X GPU is now generally available on IBM Cloud, with integration planned across the watsonx platform and Red Hat AI platforms. IBM Fusion HCI adds support for AMD Instinct MI210 GPUs, offering additional cost-effective options. IBM is also using next-generation NVIDIA GB200 NVL72 rack-scale systems to advance its Granite family of enterprise-grade foundation models, and recently announced support for NVIDIA H200 GPUs. These additions build on IBM’s broad installed base of NVIDIA accelerated computing platforms. IBM also offers Intel® Gaudi® 3 AI accelerators, reinforcing its commitment to offering flexible infrastructure for AI and HPC workloads.

To make AI more accessible, IBM is strengthening its collaboration with Red Hat. Red Hat AI InstructLab is now generally available as a service on IBM Cloud, empowering businesses to build and deploy custom gen AI models tailored to their needs, all while using private data, without software installations or GPU management required. By simplifying InstructLab model tuning, organizations can build more efficient models tailored to the organization’s unique needs while retaining control of their data.

“Our partnership with IBM is centered on helping clients drive productivity and growth, especially through AI and automation,” said Matt Langione, Managing Director and Partner at Boston Consulting Group. “We’re seeing rising demand for smaller, fine-tuned language models tailored to specific business needs. These models provide a practical way for clients to build differentiated AI capabilities while managing costs and maintaining control over their data and IP.”

IBM’s enterprise sovereign cloud capabilities are designed to help support clients in highly regulated industries manage their regulatory requirements. Regulations around the world continue to grow, such as the Digital Operational Resiliency Act, which is now in effect. DORA is a European Union regulation that aims to establish technical standards that financial entities and their critical third-party technology service providers must implement in their ICT systems.

DORA requires financial institutions to define the business recovery process, service levels and recovery times that are acceptable for their business-critical processes. IBM Cloud offers a range of tools and services to help clients meet specific requirements across each of the DORA pillars: the IBM Cloud Security and Compliance Center - Workload Protection (ICT risk management), IBM X-force (Incident Management), BC/DR Testing Tools (Operational Resiliency Testing), and Cloud Pack for Security (Information and intelligence sharing).

IBM continues to follow the latest updates from regulatory bodies and monitor draft legislation to support our clients as they make informed decisions based on specific use cases, risk appetite, data type, threat landscape, business drivers, security needs and more.

As enterprises in regulated sectors look to maintain stability, preserve market integrity and protect confidential data, they should place an emphasis on operational resilience to help keep mission-critical workloads up and running. This has been a key focus for IBM Cloud’s expanded offerings over the past couple of years. Our IBM Cloud Security and Compliance Center Workload Protection platform provides visibility, posture management and workload protection across hybrid multicloud environments. We also help clients meet their data privacy requirements through confidential computing, encryption capabilities and key management controls.

IBM Cloud continues to invest in operational resilience and grow our global Multizone Region (MZR) footprint. Following the opening of our Madrid region in 2023, we recently opened the doors to our newest region in Montreal. Our in-country IBM Cloud MZRs are designed to enable clients to deploy AI and mission-critical workloads with high levels of security and help clients address their data sovereignty and regulatory compliance requirements. In Canada, specifically, this includes helping them on their journey to demonstrate their compliance with the Government of Canada's Protected B Medium Profile, a security level defined by the government for sensitive information and assets.

RISE with SAP has emerged as a business priority for enterprises across all industries as they move to SAP S/4HANA Cloud, and this past year, IBM announced the upcoming release of RISE with SAP on IBM Power Virtual Server. This is designed to make it the fastest and easiest path for IBM Power customers to accelerate their ERP transformation, while organizations can more seamlessly transition and modernize their on-premises ERP environments to the cloud and support AI-powered business processes.

Partnering with System Integrators is crucial for SAP RISE on IBM Power Virtual Server. IBM’s partner investment program is gaining traction, deepening engagement and accelerating enablement with key System Integrators, including IBM Consulting to both start-up and scale-out the Rise with SAP PowerVS opportunities.

IBM aims to enable clients to focus less on IT and more on driving outcomes as we strive to make it simpler, faster, and more economical to leverage IBM Software and Infrastructure as-a-service (XaaS). We are bringing our clients an integrated, enterprise platform experience with a set of pre-configured patterns to help with automating our solution offerings. Deployable Architectures (DAs) can offer quick, easy and secured pre-configured deployment automation for IBM offerings on IBM Cloud, aiming to help address the risk, burden, and cost of deployment. 

Recently, IBM Cloud announced VCF as a Service (VCFaaS), which provides a fully managed VMware solution that allows businesses to deploy and manage VMware virtual data centers and virtual machines seamlessly on the cloud, with the support of IBM’s dedicated infrastructure. Years of experience in operating enterprise-class VMware Cloud Services has taught us how to address different scenarios and how to take cost into consideration—which is exactly what VCFaaS sets out to achieve.

There is no one-size-fits-all approach to cloud or modernization at large, and it takes the right combination of technology, skills, and support suited to each enterprise’s unique needs. As organizations navigate the complexities of hybrid cloud and AI and make intentional choices about workload placement, IBM remains committed to meeting our clients where they are in their journeys. 

Learn more about IBM Cloud