IBM released its fiscal 2026 Q3 earnings on October 21, 2026, reporting total revenue of $17.103 billion, up 5% year over year and above expectations. Adjusted EPS was $2.95, up 11%. Software revenue rose 8% to $7.804 billion, while consulting revenue was roughly flat at $5.335 billion, with AI-related work accounting for about 30% of consulting revenue. The company raised its full-year software revenue growth guidance to 7%-8% and lifted its free cash flow growth guidance to more than $1 billion.
IBM released the new Granite Speech 5.0 series of speech models, including the new granite-speech-5.0-2b and updated versions of granite-speech-5.0-470m-turboctc and granite-speech-4.1-2b-plus. The models support multilingual transcription and translation, with improved noise and reverberation robustness, language-ID prompting, keyword biasing, and coverage of enterprise-grade speech scenarios.
IBM announced plans to release an early research and development process design kit (PDK) for its 7-angstrom (0.7nm) nanostack technology in the first quarter of 2027, enabling fabless chip companies, EDA vendors, equipment suppliers and research institutions to evaluate the emerging architecture before it matures. The initial version is expected to include sample standard cell libraries for logic functions and an example SRAM design, but not all models of a mature commercial PDK.
On September 23, 2026, Verizon announced a $70 million investment in a nationwide AI skills initiative, launching a portal offering AI training from IBM, Google, Microsoft, Anthropic, Coursera, and OpenAI.
Rapidus President Atsuyoshi Koike announced in a U.S. speech that the company plans to build a semiconductor factory on the Moon by around 2040, citing available water resources, and showed an AI-generated concept video. IBM CEO Arvind Krishna said at the same event that the two companies are jointly developing 1-nanometer chips.
NASA and IBM released the NASA-IBM Lunar Foundation Model on Thursday, an open-source AI system available for download from Hugging Face. The model is particularly adept at identifying areas on the lunar surface that may contain ice, achieving a 23% lower error rate than Microsoft's SwinV2-B, a 19% improvement in crater identification performance, and using half the training data.
IBM launches Granite 4.0 3B Vision, a 3-billion-parameter visual-language model optimized for extracting complex enterprise document data. It excels in processi