Most of their fabs were divested to GlobalFoundries, but they still have pretty significant fab capability and capacity- I suspect at least partly to have a us-based chip-making for military ("Trusted Foundry").
The labs might not be that different from consulting, the NYT reporting on this notes they run R&D labs so they can license the tech they develop to people who actually make chips.
IBM has been the company with the most patent registrations in the US for I think 29 of the last 30 years. They're one of the largest industrial research organizations in the world. They're doing more hard science research than almost anyone else.
Which is so weird, right? Like what is IBM now and how does a research lab make sense with the rest of their business?
The money-making parts of IBM are: legacy software and hardware (declining), consulting (low margin, low leverage), enterprise software (mostly redhat, not really growing). It's hard to explain how IBM research is accretive to any of that.
Licensing is a substantial source of revenue, and their servers have very impressive (think Telum’s caching) innovations, even though they rely on third-parties for manufacturing the chips themselves.
They are also betting on quantum computing to become commercially relevant.
I don't know enough about their business to say, but I'm thrilled at even the idea that someone might actually value long-term success over quarterly earnings.
It's just a shame that none of it seems to pan out, and in the areas where I know what they're talking about, it all sounds like cynical nonsense to me.