Jane Edwards 
IBM has introduced new software designed to help governments, enterprises and service providers develop, deploy and manage sovereign environments for artificial intelligence-ready workloads.
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What Is IBM Sovereign Core?
The company said Thursday IBM Sovereign Core is purpose-built software that could enable organizations to maintain complete authority over deployment decisions, operations and system configurations as well as manage and store operational data, audit trails and system telemetry within the sovereign boundary.
IBM will make the software available in tech preview beginning in February, with full general availability planned for mid-2026.
“Businesses are facing growing pressure to innovate while meeting tightening regulatory requirements and recognizing the importance of controlling how sensitive data and AI workloads are accessed and operated,” said Priya Srinivasan, general manager of IBM Software Products.
“This shift is creating an urgent need for sovereign solutions that deliver AI-ready environments. With IBM Sovereign Core, we are helping clients move faster and with confidence— combining openness, compliance, and operational autonomy to meet the demands of the AI era, without the need to sacrifice sovereignty requirements,” added Srinivasan.
How Is IBM Expanding AI Capabilities Across Government & Industry?
IBM has advanced multiple AI initiatives across defense and enterprise domains.
In October, the company rolled out the IBM Defense Model, an AI model developed with defense intelligence firm Janes designed to improve intelligence capabilities in defense and national security. It also partnered with Groq to combine its watsonx Orchestrate agentic AI orchestration platform with Groq’s inference technology to help customers accelerate agentic AI deployment efforts.
IBM is collaborating with Lockheed Martin to integrate its enterprise-ready Granite large language models into Lockheed’s AI Factory tools to strengthen security within the defense and aerospace sectors.
