Dive Brief:

• IBM announced the opening of four new cloud data centers in the United States on Wednesday, including two new facilities in Dallas, Texas, and two new facilities in Washington, D.C.
• The new centers will "support growing enterprise demand for cloud infrastructure that can provide access to services like IoT, blockchain, quantum computing and cognitive," according to an IBM announcement.
• IBM now has more than 55 global cloud data centers in 19 countries.

Dive Insight:

IBM says the new centers are "geared for big data workloads," to help enterprises run compute-heavy workloads, such as AI, deep learning and high performance data analytics.

IDC recently estimated that three-quarters of developer teams will use cognitive and AI functions in at least one application or service by 2018. Big Blue is pushing that technology, leveraging its cognitive capabilities across sectors. 

Last November, IBM announced Project Intu, a platform designed to allow developers to more easily embed Watson cognitive computing functions into a variety of devices. And Watson is now working in financial services to help companies find "rogue traders." 

New applications of technology require more computing power, especially as the global cognitive computing market is expected to generate revenue of $13.7 billion by 2020, according to Allied Market Research.