ASML and IBM, hardware brothers in arms for more than four decades

With its announcement of IC production technology for the 2nm node, IBM underlined that it’s still playing in the premier league in chip research. That’s both remarkable and intriguing. Remarkable because it marks half a century of hegemony in advanced chip technology. Intriguing because Big Blue turned itself around from a computer company to a giant consultancy and service organization in the last decades. Although it hardly mentions “hardware” anymore, it definitely wants to be associated with the technical stuff everyone’s talking about these days, like AI, cloud, quantum computing and security.

Yet, IBM still produces hardware. It’s still selling mainframes – now dubbed as the IBM Z platform – together with power and storage systems. Last year, its revenue in hardware amounted to 5.5 billion dollars. This is a mere 7.5 percent of its total revenue, but it nevertheless gives a high priority to research in this area. One would rather expect new nanometer milestones from Intel, a semiconductor company that gets almost all of its sales from chips.