IBM Unveils z16, Industry’s First Quantum-Safe System

IBM unveiled IBM z16, their next-generation system with an integrated on-chip AI accelerator delivering latency-optimized inferencing. This innovation is designed to enable clients to analyze real-time transactions, at scale for mission-critical workloads such as credit card, healthcare, and financial transactions. z16 is also specifically designed to help protect against near-future threats that might be used to crack today’s encryption technologies.

“IBM is the gold standard for highly secured transaction processing. Now with IBM z16 innovations, our clients can increase decision velocity with inferencing right where their mission-critical data lives,“ said Ric Lewis, SVP, IBM Systems. “This opens up tremendous opportunities to change the game in their respective industries so they will be positioned to deliver better customer experiences and more powerful business outcomes.

z16 brings together AI inferencing, via its Telum Processor, with highly secured and reliable high-volume transaction processing. For the first time, banks can analyze for fraud during transactions on a massive scale: z16 can process 300 billion inference requests per day with just one millisecond of latency. For consumers, this could mean reducing the time and energy required to handle fraudulent transactions on their credit cards. For both merchants and card issuers, this could mean a reduction in revenue loss as consumers could avoid the frustration associated with false declines where they might turn to other cards for future transactions.

Building on IBM technologies like Pervasive Encryption and Confidential Computing, z16 takes cyber resiliency a leap further by protecting data against future threats that could evolve with advances in quantum computing. As the industry’s first quantum-safe system, it is underpinned by lattice-based cryptography, an approach for constructing security primitives that help protect data and systems against current and future threats. With quantum-safe cryptography, businesses can future-ready their applications and data today.

With secure boot, z16 clients can strengthen their cyber resiliency posture and retain control of their system. Also, the Crypto Express 8S (CEX8S) hardware security module will offer clients both classical and quantum-safe cryptographic technology to help address their use cases requiring information confidentiality, integrity, and non-repudiation. Both secure boot and quantum-safe cryptography can help clients address future quantum-computing related threats including harvest now, decrypt later attacks which can lead to extortion, loss of intellectual property, and disclosure of other sensitive data.