“With Power11, clients can accelerate into the AI era with innovations tailored to their most pressing business needs,” says Tom McPherson, GM, Power Systems at IBM, “we are taking advantage of the full IBM stack to deliver hybrid cloud, AI, and automation capabilities.”
“It’s not going to have all the horsepower for training, but it’s going to have really good inferencing capabilities that are simple to integrate,” says McPherson.
Power11 is designed to be the most resilient server in the history of the IBM Power platform, with 99.9999% of uptime. Together with zero planned downtime for system maintenance and less than one-minute guaranteed ransomware threat detection with IBM Power Cyber Vault, Power11 sets a new bar for business continuity, addressing both planned and cyber-incident-related downtime.
For the first time ever, the Power11 general availability will simultaneously include high-end, mid-range, and entry servers as well as IBM Power Virtual Server in IBM Cloud. IBM Power Virtual Server offers a fast path to the cloud for Power workloads, and is certified as a hyperscaler platform for RISE with SAP.
Power11 will also be the first IBM Power server to support the IBM Spyre Accelerator, IBM’s system-on-a-chip available Q4 2025 that is purpose-built for today’s AI-intensive inference workloads.
Available across IBM’s enterprise systems portfolio, including Power11, IBM z17, and LinuxONE 5, Spyre will deliver advanced AI acceleration to help organizations scale AI across hybrid cloud environments.
Three core benefits which Power11 customers can expect are:
1. Zero planned downtime for system maintenance. Power11 provides enterprises with a solution that can avoid costly planned downtime and help reduce operational risk. Through advanced technologies like autonomous patching and automated workload movement, planned system maintenance events can occur without ever taking critical applications offline. This feature can free IT professionals from spending time planning, testing, and executing upgrades to their systems, to focusing on higher-value work and innovation. Furthermore, IBM Power will interoperate with IBM Concert using generative AI to help identify operational risks, provide actionable insights, and automate remediation, starting with security patch management. IBM Technology Lifecycle Services (TLS), IBM’s global infrastructure support provider, complements this feature with premium, AI-powered services designed to help proactively monitor system health, reduce downtime, and optimize system reliability and performance.
2. Less than one minute ransomware threat detection with IBM Power Cyber Vault. The Power Cyber Vault solution is an integrated cyber resiliency solution following NIST cybersecurity framework to help identify, protect, detect, and automatically respond to cyber threats. Cyber Vault provides protection against cyberattacks such as data corruption and encryption with proactive immutable snapshots that are automatically captured, stored, and tested on a custom-defined schedule. Power11 also uses NIST-approved built-in quantum-safe cryptography designed to help protect systems from harvest-now, decrypt-later attacks as well as firmware integrity attacks.
3. Transformed business processes with AI integration. Power11 delivers AI-ready infrastructure with built-in, on-chip acceleration for inferencing and will be able to scale to support mission-critical AI workloads through the IBM Spyre Accelerator. Combined with Red Hat OpenShift AI and a broad ecosystem of open-source software and toolkits, Power11 is built to provide the flexibility and performance needed to operationalize AI across hybrid environments. To further modernize application development, IBM watsonx Code Assistant for i will help developers extend critical RPG applications for greater ease and productivity. IBM will also make watsonx.data, its hybrid, open data lakehouse, available on Power11 by the end of 2025.
Efficient IT that saves time and money. Beyond the autonomous processes that support zero planned downtime and IBM Power Cyber Vault, Power11 delivers meaningful efficiency gains across the IT stack. Separately, in terms of energy efficiency, Power11 offers twice the performance per watt versus comparable x86 servers7 and up to 28 percent better server efficiency with the new Energy Efficient Mode compared to Maximum Performance Mode on Power11.
