IBM Research is the research and development division for IBM, an American multinational information technology company. IBM Research is headquartered at the Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York, near IBM headquarters in Armonk, New York. It has operations in over 170 countries and twelve laboratories on six continents.
IBM employees have garnered six Nobel Prizes, seven Turing Awards, 20 inductees into the U.S. National Inventors Hall of Fame, 19 National Medals of Technology, five National Medals of Science and three Kavli Prizes. the company had generated more patents than any other business in each of 25 consecutive years.
History
The roots of today's IBM Research began with the 1945 opening of the Watson Scientific Computing Laboratory at Columbia University, that was the first IBM laboratory devoted to pure science. It later expanded into additional IBM Research locations in Westchester County, New York, starting in the 1950s, including the Thomas J. Watson Research Center in 1961.
Notable company inventions include the floppy disk, the hard disk drive, the magnetic stripe card, the relational database, the Universal Product Code (UPC), the financial swap, the Fortran programming language, SABRE airline reservation system, DRAM, copper wiring in semiconductors, the smartphone, the portable computer, the ATM, the silicon-on-insulator (SOI) semiconductor manufacturing process, Watson artificial intelligence and the Quantum Experience.
Advances in nanotechnology include IBM in atoms, where a scanning tunneling microscope was used to arrange 35 individual xenon atoms on a substrate of chilled crystal of nickel to spell out the three letter company acronym. It was the first time atoms had been precisely positioned on a flat surface.
Major undertakings at IBM Research have included the invention of innovative materials and structures, high-performance microprocessors and computers, analytical methods and tools, algorithms, software architectures, methods for managing, searching and deriving meaning from data and in turning IBM's advanced services methodologies into reusable assets.
IBM Research's numerous contributions to physical and computer sciences include the Scanning Tunneling Microscope and high-temperature superconductivity, both of which were awarded the Nobel Prize. IBM Research was behind the inventions of the SABRE travel reservation system, the technology of laser eye surgery, magnetic storage, the relational database, UPC barcodes and Watson, the question-answering computing system that won a match against human champions on the Jeopardy! television quiz show. The Watson technology is now being commercialized as part of a project with healthcare company Anthem Inc. Other notable developments include the Data Encryption Standard (DES), fast Fourier transform (FFT), Benoît Mandelbrot's introduction of fractals, magnetic disk storage (hard disks), the MELD-Plus risk score, the one-transistor dynamic random-access memory (DRAM), the reduced instruction set computer (RISC) architecture, relational databases, and Deep Blue (grandmaster-level chess-playing computer).
Notable IBM researchers
There are a number of computer scientists "who made IBM Research famous." These include Frances E. Allen, Marc Auslander, John Backus, Charles H. Bennett, Erich Bloch, Grady Booch, Fred Brooks (known for his book The Mythical Man-Month), Peter Brown, Larry Carter, Gregory Chaitin, John Cocke, Alan Cobham, Edgar F. Codd, Don Coppersmith, Wallace Eckert, Ronald Fagin, Horst Feistel, Jeanne Ferrante, Zvi Galil, Ralph E. Gomory, Jim Gray, Joseph Halpern, Kenneth E. Iverson, Frederick Jelinek, Reynold B. Johnson, Benoit Mandelbrot, Robert Mercer, C. Mohan, Kirsten Moselund, Michael O. Rabin, Arthur Samuel, Barbara Simons, Alfred Spector, Gardiner Tucker, Moshe Vardi, John Vlissides, Mark N. Wegman and Shmuel Winograd.
Laboratories IBM had 19 research facilities spread across twelve laboratories on six continents including in Nairobi, Kenya, and Johannesburg, South Africa in Africa; in Cambridge, Massachusetts, San Jose, California, and at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center, in Yorktown Heights and Albany, New York, US, in North America; in Haifa, Israel, in the Middle East; in Dublin, Ireland, Zürich, Switzerland, and Daresbury and Hursley, United Kingdom, in Europe; and in Delhi and Bengaluru, India, in Tokyo, Kyoto and Shin-Kawasaki, Japan, in Asia.
Historic research centers for IBM also include IBM La Gaude (Nice), the Cambridge Scientific Center, the IBM New York Scientific Center, 330 North Wabash (Chicago), IBM Austin Research Laboratory, and IBM Laboratory Vienna.
In 2017, IBM invested $240 million to create the MIT–IBM Watson AI Lab. Headquartered in Cambridge, MA, the Lab is a unique joint research venture in artificial intelligence established by IBM and MIT and brings together researchers in academia and industry to advance AI that has a real world impact for business, academic and society. The Lab funds approximately 50 projects per year, which are co-led by principal investigators from MIT and IBM Research, with results published regularly at top peer-reviewed journals and conferences. Projects range from computer vision, natural language processing and reinforcement learning, to devising new ways to ensure that AI systems are fair, reliable and secure.
Silicon Valley
In 2025, IBM Research moved its Almaden-based lab from the Almaden Valley, San Jose, California to the new IBM Research-Silicon Valley Lab in San Jose, California. Its scientists continue to perform basic and applied research in computer science, services, storage systems, physical sciences, and materials science and technology.
The former IBM Research – Almaden location occupied part of a site owned by IBM at 650 Harry Road on nearly of land in the Santa Teresa Hills above Silicon Valley. The site, built in 1985 for the research center, was chosen because of its close proximity to Stanford University, UC Santa Cruz, UC Berkeley and other collaborative academic institutions. Today, the research division is still the largest tenant of the site, but the majority of occupants work for other divisions of IBM.
IBM opened its first West Coast research center, the San Jose Research Laboratory in 1952, managed by Reynold B. Johnson. Among its first developments was the IBM 350, the first commercial moving head hard disk drive. Launched in 1956, this saw use in the IBM 305 RAMAC computer system. Subdivisions included the Advanced Systems Development Division. Directors of the center include hard disc drive developer Jack Harker.
Scientists at IBM Research – Almaden, now IBM Research-Silicon Valley have contributed to several scientific discoveries such as the development of photoresists and the quantum mirage effect.
The following are some of the notable scientists who have worked in the past or are currently working in this laboratory: Rakesh Agrawal, Miklos Ajtai, Rama Akkiraju, John Backus, Raymond F. Boyce, Donald D. Chamberlin, Ashok K. Chandra, Edgar F. Codd, Mark Dean, Cynthia Dwork, Don Eigler, Ronald Fagin, Jim Gray, Laura M. Haas, Jean Paul Jacob, Joseph Halpern, Andreas J. Heinrich, Reynold B. Johnson, Maria Klawe, Jaishankar Menon, Dharmendra Modha, William E. Moerner, C. Mohan, Stuart Parkin, Nick Pippenger, Dan Russell, Patricia Selinger, Ted Selker, Barbara Simons, Malcolm Slaney, Arnold Spielberg, Ramakrishnan Srikant, Larry Stockmeyer, Moshe Vardi, Jennifer Widom, Shumin Zhai.
Australia IBM Research – Australia was a research and development laboratory established by IBM Research in 2009 in Melbourne. It was involved in social media, interactive content, healthcare analytics and services research, multimedia analytics, and genomics. The inaugural lab director was IBM Distinguished Engineer Glenn Wightwick and the lab was subsequently headed by several directors over its 10 years lifespan, including Vice President, Joanna Batstone and Professor Iven Mareels. It was to be the company's first laboratory combining research and development in a single organization.
The opening of the Melbourne lab in 2011 received an injection of $22 million in Australian Federal Government funding and an undisclosed amount provided by the state government. The Melbourne Research lab was closed in 2021, approximately at the same time as the deal for tax breaks from the state government ended. Approximately 80 full-time researchers were made redundant.
Brazil IBM Research – Brazil, established in 2011, was the first IBM Research laboratory in South America, with locations in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. Research focuses include industrial technology and science, systems of engagement and insight, social data analytics and natural resources solutions.
The new lab was IBM's ninth at the time of opening and the first in twelve years. According to The Wall Street Journal, its establishment underscored the growing importance of emerging markets and the globalization of innovation. In collaboration with Brazil's government, it was reported at the time to help IBM to develop technology systems around natural resource development and large-scale events such as the 2016 Summer Olympics.
Engineer and associate lab director Ulisses Mello stated, in 2014, that IBM had four priority areas in Brazil:
The lab was closed on December 18, 2025, with IBM mentioning the work done by the lab would be consolidated with the work performed by other labs in different regions.
Japan The IBM Research – Tokyo, which was called IBM Tokyo Research Laboratory (TRL) before January 2009, is one of IBM's twelve major worldwide research laboratories. It is a branch of IBM Research, and about 200 researchers work for TRL. Established in 1982 as the Japan Science Institute (JSI) in Tokyo, it was renamed to IBM Tokyo Research Laboratory in 1986, and moved to Yamato in 1992 and back to Tokyo in 2012.
IBM Tokyo Research Laboratory was established in 1982 as the Japan Science Institute (JSI) in Sanbanchō, Tokyo. It was IBM's first research laboratory in Asia. Hisashi Kobayashi was appointed the founding director of TRL in 1982; he served as director until 1986. JSI was renamed to the IBM Tokyo Research Laboratory in 1986. In 1988, English-to-Japanese machine translation system called "System for Human-Assisted Language Translation" (SHALT) was developed at TRL. It was used to translate IBM manuals.
History TRL was shifted from downtown Tokyo to the suburbs to share a building with IBM Yamato Facility in Yamato, Kanagawa Prefecture in 1993. In 1993, world record was accomplished for generation of continuous coherent Ultraviolet rays. In 1996, Java JIT compiler was developed at TRL, and it was released for major IBM platforms. Numerous other technological breakthroughs were made at TRL.
The team led by Chieko Asakawa (:ja:浅川智恵子), IBM Fellow since 2009, provided basic technology for IBM's software programs for the visually handicapped, IBM Home Page Reader in 1997 and IBM aiBrowser (:ja:aiBrowser) in 2007. TRL moved back to Tokyo in 2012, this time at IBM Toyosu Facility.
Research TRL researchers are responsible for numerous breakthroughs in sciences and engineering. The researchers have presented multiple papers at international conferences, and published numerous papers in international journals. They have also contributed to the products and services of IBM, and patent filings. TRL conducts research in microdevices, system software, security and privacy, analytics and optimization, human computer interaction, embedded systems, and services sciences.
Other activities TRL collaborates with the Japanese universities, and support their research programs. IBM donates its equipment such as servers, storage systems, and so forth to the Japanese universities to support their research programs under the Shared University Research (SUR) program.