IBM has announced an expanded collaboration with NVIDIA at GTC 2026, focused on helping enterprises operationalize AI from pilot to full-scale production. The partnership advances GPU-native data analytics, intelligent document processing, on-premises and regulated infrastructure, cloud offerings, and consulting services to overcome persistent barriers in data access, infrastructure readiness, compliance, and expertise.
Quick Intel
Enterprises continue to invest heavily in AI, yet most remain challenged in moving beyond experimentation due to fragmented data, infrastructure limitations, compliance constraints in regulated sectors, and a lack of implementation guidance. This expanded IBM-NVIDIA collaboration targets these core obstacles by unifying data, infrastructure, and expertise layers to enable production-scale AI.
"In the next wave of enterprise AI, the model layer will rely on the data, infrastructure, and orchestration layers – and on businesses that can bring all three together," said Arvind Krishna, Chairman and CEO, IBM. "Our partnership with NVIDIA goes to the heart of that challenge. Together, we're giving enterprises the solutions they need to stop experimenting with AI and start running on it."
"IBM pioneered enterprise computing and data processing six decades ago — and today they are redefining it for the AI era," said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA. "Data is the ground truth that gives AI context and meaning. Together with IBM, we are bringing CUDA GPU acceleration directly into the data layer — turning analytics and document processing from bottlenecks into real-time intelligence engines."
For structured data analytics, the open-source integration of NVIDIA cuDF with IBM watsonx.data Presto accelerates query execution on massive datasets. A production proof-of-concept with Nestlé's global Order-to-Cash data mart—spanning terabytes across 44 tables and 186 countries—reduced refresh times from 15 minutes on CPUs to three minutes on GPUs, yielding significant cost and performance improvements while leveraging Nestlé's unified data foundation.
Unstructured data challenges are addressed through Docling paired with NVIDIA Nemotron models, which standardize documents into AI-ready formats and accelerate multi-modal ingestion. This combination delivers higher throughput and accuracy on GPU infrastructure compared to alternative open-source approaches.
Infrastructure enhancements include NVIDIA's adoption of IBM Storage Scale System 6000 for high-throughput, parallel storage certified on DGX platforms. For regulated and sovereign environments, the partners are exploring integrations that keep GPU-intensive workloads within regional boundaries while upholding governance standards.
Cloud and consulting advancements feature NVIDIA Blackwell Ultra GPUs coming to IBM Cloud in early Q2 2026, extending to Red Hat AI Factory with NVIDIA and VPC servers with compliance controls. IBM Consulting Advantage will incorporate Red Hat AI Factory with NVIDIA to guide clients in building scalable, governed AI across hybrid environments.
These developments position IBM and NVIDIA to provide enterprises with a comprehensive, production-ready AI stack that bridges data, compute, and expertise for faster, more reliable outcomes.
About IBM
IBM is a leading provider of global hybrid cloud and AI, and consulting expertise. We help clients in more than 175 countries capitalize on insights from their data, streamline business processes, reduce costs and gain the competitive edge in their industries. Thousands of governments and corporate entities in critical infrastructure areas such as financial services, telecommunications and healthcare rely on IBM's hybrid cloud platform and Red Hat OpenShift to affect their digital transformations quickly, efficiently and securely. IBM's breakthrough innovations in AI, quantum computing, industry-specific cloud solutions and consulting deliver open and flexible options to our clients. All of this is backed by IBM's long-standing commitment to trust, transparency, responsibility, inclusivity and service.
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