IBM acquires cybersecurity firm, invests in US-Japan quantum computing

Armonk-headquartered IBM (NYSE:IBM) has announced two new endeavors to expand its prominence in the cybersecurity and quantum computing sectors.

The company announced its acquisition of Polar Security, an Israeli-based provider of security posture management, a cybersecurity segment that reveals where sensitive data is stored, how it is accessed and what vulnerabilities it carries. This technology can help companies secure their cloud and software-as-a-service (SaaS) application data. The terms of the acquisition were not disclosed, and this is the fifth company that IBM has purchased in 2023.

Separately, the Wall Street Journal reported IBM is donating $100 million in quantum computing research at the University of Chicago and the University of Tokyo as part of an effort to strengthen U.S.-Japan efforts to stay ahead of China”™s quantum computing activities. The company said the money will be used by the universities to create a quantum-centric supercomputer over the next decade that will contain 100,000 qubits, the quantum equivalent of bits in a conventional digital computer.

IBM CEO Arvind Krishna said quantum computers could model problems that are unsolvable with current computer technology, claiming that researchers “could do something in an evening that would have taken six months in a lab.”