IBM has made its artificial intelligence (AI) offering watsonx available to customers in Australia and New Zealand.
Accessible via IBM Cloud, watsonx is an enterprise-grade platform for generative AI and machine learning studios.
The necessary infrastructure will be housed in IBM's Sydney data center.
This will ensure the offering meets Australia's data sovereignty and privacy regulations by managing and storing data within the country. The offering will use IBM Cloud's network connectivity to keep latency low for customers, and will enable customers to use models including Llama-3-2-11b-vision-instruct and Granite-34b-code-instruct.
The Australian government recently introduced new regulations for AI aiming to make it "safe and responsible." IBM's launch will comply with this.
IBM has, like other cloud providers, been investing heavily in AI hardware of late. In the last couple of months, the company has made Nvidia H100 GPUs and AMD Instinct MI300X GPUs available via its cloud.
Last week, reports emerged that the company may be nearing a deal with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to use AWS' GPUs under a five-year $475 million deal.
IBM Cloud has one data center in Australia located in Sydney, and network PoPs in Perth and Melbourne. It is unclear if the company owns a facility, or leases space in a colocation data center in Sydney.
Sydney has a major data center market. Operators include NextDC, Digital Realty, Keppel Data Centres, Vocus, Macquarie, Iseek, AirTrunk, Global Switch, and Equinix. Amazon Web Services operates data centers in Sydney which host a cloud region.
