IBM just placed two very different tech bets in one day
A hundred years ago, International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) built machines that helped the United States count its census.
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On September 10, 2026, it did something stranger. It opened a quantum computing lab tied to Swiss defense spending, then released an open-source AI model built to map the moon.
Most companies pick one narrative and repeat it until investors believe it. IBM picked two, on the same day, with two entirely different partners: a defense contractor and a space agency.
The quantum hub is not really a research story. It is a fighter jet story. Switzerland’s offset agreement with Lockheed Martin Corporation (LMT) traces back to a 2021 order for 36 F-35A jets, a deal worth $9.1 billion.
That purchase created a Lockheed Martin offset obligation worth about $3 billion, or 60% of the contract’s value, according to armasuisse figures reported by The Defense Watch.
Most of that obligation has gone toward manufacturing work such as engine training systems, canopy components and ammunition production.
A quantum lab at ETH Zurich is a different kind of payback. It will host Switzerland’s first IBM Quantum System Two by the end of 2026, according to IBM’s newsroom. The shift toward advanced technology, rather than factory work, comes as the F-35 deal faces political pressure over cost overruns and U.S. tariffs, according to DefenseMirror.
IBM, not Lockheed, actually supplies and operates that machine. Lockheed gets credit toward a binding obligation tied to jets it already sold. IBM gets a government-funded showcase for its hardware, arriving through a defense contractor’s political obligation rather than a commercial sale IBM would have had to win outright.
The timing sharpens that read. IBM completed its acquisition of HRL Laboratories in late August, according to a company release, adding in-house expertise in quantum sensing.
Quantum sensing for navigation is one of two joint research areas named for the hub, according to IBM’s newsroom. That is exactly the capability IBM just bought. IBM is not licensing hardware to a defense partner. It is running technology it acquired three weeks earlier, inside a deal structured to satisfy someone else’s political obligation.
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Hours after the Zurich announcement, IBM and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) released the NASA IBM Lunar Foundation Model, according to IBM’s newsroom.
The model is trained on decades of lunar observation data and made freely available. Reuters covered the release, noting it is meant to help identify ice, craters and other lunar surface features.
The model outperforms widely used detection methods by up to 23% when identifying potential ice deposits, craters and volcanic formations, according to IBM. That gain is not uniform. Improvement on volcanic features is closer to 3%, according to The Next Web, reminding readers that headline statistics can mask a more modest average.
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The model runs on TerraTorch, an open-source toolkit IBM built for geospatial AI, according to The Next Web. That toolkit has an obvious civilian use mapping lunar ice for NASA’s Artemis program, and an equally obvious one in satellite analysis for defense clients.
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IBM is not building two AI stacks for two customers. It is building one and licensing access to both.
IBM trades on the New York Stock Exchange and remains widely held by pension funds and index investors. Shares closed at $234.02 on September 10, down 2.47% on the day, even as MarketBeat flagged both partnerships as positive news.
The stock has had a rough year. Shares sit nearly 30% below the 52-week high of $332.46 they touched earlier in 2026. The steepest drop came in mid-July, the stock’s worst single trading day in decades, according to Fortune.
CEO Arvind Krishna admitted the company had not adapted quickly enough.
IBM Z mainframe sales fell 42% last quarter, dragging the broader infrastructure segment down 7%, according to Evercore ISI estimates. That signals where investor worry still sits. Not every analyst reads the selloff as a warning.
Evercore ISI analyst Amit Daryanani argues investors are getting exposure to IBM’s quantum initiatives essentially for free at current prices, according to MarketWatch.
Wall Street holds an overall Buy consensus on IBM stock. Twenty-five analysts set a 12-month price target of $245.35, a 4.84% increase from current levels, according to stockanalysis.com.
Switzerland is not the only F-35 buyer carrying an offset obligation like this one. Finland’s own F-35 purchase is worth about $10 billion. It carries a similar industrial participation requirement: 30% of the contract price, according to Finland’s Ministry of Defence. So far, that money has gone mostly to fuselage and engine assembly work, not laboratories.
Switzerland’s tech hub version of an offset deal is new. It hands Lockheed, and any rival negotiating its own offset terms, a template that skips the factory floor entirely.
That distinction should matter more to investors than any other press release. Evercore ISI analyst Amit Daryanani has argued that investors are getting IBM’s quantum bet essentially for free at current prices. That case grows stronger every time a government funds an installation rather than IBM winning a commercial sale.
IBM’s quantum book of business already tops $1 billion and is growing every quarter, according to Evercore ISI estimates cited by Yahoo Finance. None of that shows up in the number the market keeps punishing, which is IBM Z mainframe revenue.
The next real test lands at IBM’s next earnings report, scheduled for October 21, according to stockanalysis.com. Investors will get a fresh mainframe number that day, and the stock will likely trade on it regardless.
What deserves more attention is whether IBM discloses how much of its quantum backlog now runs through offset deals like Switzerland’s. That revenue is government-funded and never had to win a competitive commercial bid to exist.
Related: IBM CEO sends blunt message on quantum computing
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This story was originally published September 12, 2026 at 4:03 AM.
