IBM has upgraded the Power chip series launched since 2020, unveiling Power11, a data centre chip built for industries where performance, resilience, and security cannot be compromised.
From July 25, the new Power11 systems will hit the market, bringing enhancements in energy efficiency, ransomware detection, and uninterrupted operations.
This launch is not about competing in Artificial Intelligence model training, instead, IBM says Power11 is designed for AI inference, the point at which businesses put AI to work, not the heavy lifting of building models. And that’s precisely where IBM believes it can win.
“We can integrate AI capabilities seamlessly into this for inference acceleration and help their business process improvements,” said Tom McPherson, general manager of Power Systems at IBM.
“It’s not going to have all the horsepower for training or anything, but it’s going to have really good inferencing capabilities that are simple to integrate.”
IBM is targeting sectors like finance, healthcare, and government, fields where downtime translates to disaster. With zero planned maintenance shutdowns and an average of just over 30 seconds of unplanned downtime per year, Power11 systems aim for what IBM calls “six nines” of availability—99.9999% uptime.
Ransomware is another threat IBM is addressing. Power11 systems can reportedly detect and respond to a ransomware attack within one minute. This defence is supported by the IBM Power Cyber Vault, which includes quantum-safe cryptography and immutable snapshot backups, measures aligned with the latest NIST cybersecurity standards.
The chip also comes with serious performance numbers. Compared to its Power9 predecessor, Power11 delivers up to 55% more performance per core. It outpaces Power10 with a 45% boost in capacity and offers two times better performance per watt when compared to x86 servers.
In Energy Efficient Mode, it still outperforms AMD’s Epyc 9004 and Intel’s Xeon 6 with up to 28% better server efficiency and bandwidth per socket reaching 1,200 GB/s, more than double that of AMD and nearly twice that of Intel.
IBM isn’t limiting this launch to one end of the market either. The company is rolling out high-end, mid-range, and entry-level servers all at once.
For the first time, Power Virtual Server is also debuting in IBM Cloud, allowing users to access Power11 via the cloud and scale operations as needed. The system is already certified for RISE with SAP, showing IBM’s alignment with enterprise digital transformation strategies.
By the fourth quarter of 2025, Power11 will be integrated with Spyre, IBM’s own AI accelerator chip introduced last year. Spyre is tailored for low-latency, high-throughput inference across hybrid cloud environments, ensuring AI tasks run efficiently across both on-premises and cloud platforms.
IBM is working to simplify how enterprises apply AI in everyday processes, quickly, securely, and without the need to shut down.
