IBM Launches Four Cloud Data Centers in US

IBM is continuing to expand its global network of cloud data centers, the latest addition being four data centers in the US – two each in Washington, D.C., and Dallas.

Cloud has been one of the few bright spots in the company’s overall picture of declining revenue in recent years as it struggles to adjust to the new world where enterprises are not signing nearly as many big data center hardware and services contracts as they used to, opting instead for cloud services by the likes of Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure.

IBM’s cloud revenue grew 33 percent in the first quarter, while the business as a whole saw its revenue decline for the 20^th consecutive quarter. Its cloud revenue over the last 12 months was $14.6 billion.

Also growing are IBM’s analytics and cognitive solutions businesses, which are closely integrated with cloud, sold as services running on the company’s cloud platform.

Expanding data centers that host this platform is strategically important as the company faces stiff competition from the cloud giants, who have been investing tens of billions of dollars in data center infrastructure annually.

With the four new facilities online, IBM has more than 55 cloud data centers in 19 countries, 22 of them in the US. The company has not disclosed the capacity of the new server farms, saying only that each of them can support “thousands of physical servers.”

Read more: Cloud by the Megawatt: Inside IBM's Cloud Data Center Strategy