IBM has signed a multi-year, $240 million agreement with Together AI to build a dedicated Nvidia inference cluster on IBM Cloud, the companies announced Tuesday. The deal provides the open-source AI provider with a block of enterprise-grade GPU capacity as it deepens its push into large corporate accounts.
Under the agreement, IBM will deploy a large cluster of Nvidia HGX B300 systems inside IBM Cloud, with the hardware expected to come online in the first quarter of 2027. Together AI will use the capacity to serve inference on open-source models. IBM claims this is the first dedicated cluster of this size built for inference on IBM Cloud using the B300, wired with Nvidia’s Spectrum-X Ethernet networking. Nvidia states the configuration can generate 30 times more “AI factory output” than its previous generation, though this claim is not independently verified.
Together AI, founded in 2022, rents cloud infrastructure to companies building on open, modular AI stacks. It recently raised an $800 million Series C at an $8.3 billion valuation and currently serves 400 trillion tokens monthly through its inference product, supporting over one million developers. CEO Vipul Ved Prakash said the IBM cluster will help reach more customers without forcing them to pay frontier-model prices. “Enterprises want the performance of the best frontier models without the closed-model price tag, and that only works if the infrastructure underneath is fast and reliable at scale,” he said, calling the deal “a big step in our push to make open-source AI the obvious choice for enterprises.”
For IBM, the deal expands its partnership with Nvidia. Alan Peacock, general manager of IBM Cloud, tied the deployment to corporate demand for agentic AI, saying IBM and Nvidia are “delivering scalable, economical, enterprise-grade AI infrastructure.” Nvidia’s Dion Harris compared AI factories to basic utilities like electricity. The two companies are also collaborating on GPU-native data analytics and unstructured data extraction. IBM stock gained 1.51% on the news, while Nvidia rose 0.46%. The cluster is part of a broader IBM-Nvidia push to sell AI capacity to startups and large enterprises, and follows IBM’s Project Lightwell, a $5 billion open-source security initiative with Red Hat.
