IBM Power and storage offerings are at the center of the company’s call to channel partners as the data‑center component market tightens.
Supply Advantage for Partners
Arvind Krishna, IBM’s chairman, president and chief executive, told a trade outlet that the vendor’s supply chain holds pricing for about a month, longer than many rivals that can only lock in rates for a week. He urged partners to promote the availability of Power servers and storage systems to customers facing shortages.
“Because we are good about trying to manage our supply chain, so all of those costs, and we’re good about maintaining pricing for at least a month at a time—right now, I think that that’s remarkably better than most of the competition,” the CEO said.
Partners who have seen quote windows shrink can point to IBM’s $500 million backlog in the distributed‑infrastructure segment and a 37 percent year‑on‑year revenue rise in the latest quarter. The company expects the Power and Storage portfolio to grow in the low single digits by 2026.
One partner, Alex Talmor of GlassHouse Systems, noted that some clients are buying extra components now to hedge against future price spikes, while others are extending the life of existing gear or moving workloads to the cloud.
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“It’s times three, times four the initial cost,” Talmor said, adding that budgets are being reallocated away from planned projects.
Memory Cost Pressures
Industry analysts report that DRAM prices have tripled since the start of the year, and NAND pricing has risen similarly. A separate forecast puts the memory market at $1.5 trillion by 2030.
This surge is prompting a shift from compute‑centric AI designs toward memory‑centric architectures that can handle larger model parameters. The trend mirrors earlier moves toward “mixture of experts” models that spread workloads across more hardware.
IBM engineers recently demonstrated an 80‑fold increase in token throughput on a leading‑edge AI model, jumping from roughly 10,000 tokens per minute to 800,000. Even a tenfold gain would help customers offset rising component costs.
In past cycles, a shortage of GPUs forced data‑center operators to repurpose older servers, a move that temporarily slowed AI development but ultimately spurred more efficient software stacks. That history suggests today’s memory crunch could similarly accelerate innovation in hardware utilization, though the scale of today’s price hikes may be larger.
Quantum Computing Outlook
Krishna placed quantum among IBM’s four biggest platform bets, likening its potential impact to the mainframe era and the semiconductor boom. He expects the first instances of quantum advantage on IBM hardware to appear this year, with a large‑scale fault‑tolerant system targeted for 2029.
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Solution partners are already helping clients prepare for post‑quantum cryptography (PQC). Wes Brown of Arctiq said his team is educating customers on migrating to quantum‑safe ciphers early to protect data.
“Going in to say which parts of the infrastructure need to get their cryptography to evolve is an opportunity that’s measured probably in the tens of billions of dollars,” Krishna said.
The federal executive order on securing the nation against advanced cryptographic attacks shows the urgency for businesses to adopt PQC solutions.
Partners are encouraged to explore IBM’s open‑source Qiskit stack, released in 2017, and to envision algorithms that could run on future quantum hardware.
“That middle bucket of, ‘How do I help a client exploit quantum?’ is going to be the massive unlock and where I want to urge people to start thinking,” the CEO reiterated.
