[Afforess]

Rumormill at IBM is that we bought some random companies a while back just for their IPv4 blocks. You didn't hear that from me though.

[jychang]

Doubt it, everything on IBM is natted to a 10.0.0.0/8 or is running externally to 9.0.0.0/8.

Source: I work at IBM, in a division that was another company that was bought out a few years back.

[peterkelly]

I think the suggestion was that they expected those blocks could become very valuable in the future and could thus be sold for a healthy profit. I don't think GP meant that IBM wanted to actually use those addresses themselves.