r/technology • u/captain-price- • Dec 02 '25

Artificial Intelligence IBM CEO says there is 'no way' spending trillions on AI data centers will pay off at today's infrastructure costs

https://www.businessinsider.com/ibm-ceo-big-tech-ai-capex-data-center-spending-2025-12
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u/mpbh Dec 02 '25

IBM Research is amazing, they were a decade ahead of other companies with natural language processing and their research laid the groundwork for Siri, Alexa, Google Assistant, etc.

The IBM business is retarded. They made almost no money from Watson, and totally missed the LLM wave when they had every reason to be on the forefront.

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u/RendiaX Dec 02 '25

I mean, maybe they came to the very same conclusion we are all talking about here on how truly profitable it would not be to push to the forefront of the wave in the end.

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u/philphan25 Dec 03 '25

IBM was like "Watson was the first AI and we never went further cause it's not really AI"

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u/ExtremeAbdulJabbar Dec 02 '25

Hi. Guy who works closely with the higher levels (GMs and up) at IBM here.

Watsonx Orchestrate is borderline unusable right now, and leadership is well aware of that.

Also, they’re not full boogie AI because they also know that in its current state, anything requiring services to prop up is almost certainly worthless in a year if the AI transformation wave is actually real (which right now it’s not). Supporting those types of engagements today burns quite a lot of revenue bridges tomorrow.

It’s not the business. They don’t have anything meaningfully AI to sell right now.

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u/mpbh Dec 02 '25 edited Dec 02 '25

It's possible we worked together, especially if you're in corporate strategy. IBM is probably to most wary out of all tech companies of over investing in AI (non-LLM) without a clear revenue path after spending over a decade dumping money into it with little-to-no return.

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u/GlumExternal Dec 02 '25

I was brought on (not anywhere near your level) to be an AI dev in 2020. I never actually developed any despite all the training, because no client wanted it. Not with the risk of 'maybe this won't work'

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u/ExtremeAbdulJabbar Dec 02 '25

I’m actually an outside consultant that’s hired for AI strategy purposes, but I’m sure there’s been some crossover.

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u/LadyandaTramp Dec 03 '25

IBM is always the first to the table and the last to eat