IBM, the Suzhou PowerCore Technology Company and the Research Institute of Jiangsu Industrial Technology announced the two Chinese organizations will join the OpenPOWER Foundation, with Suzhou PowerCore intending to use IBM's POWER architecture to provide customized chip design solutions to push server innovation in such areas as Big Data, cloud computing and next generation data centers. The OpenPOWER Foundation is an open development alliance based on IBM's POWER microprocessor architecture. The foundation intends to enable advance server, networking, storage and acceleration technology aimed at delivering more choice, control and flexibility to developers of next generation and cloud data centers.

The foundation makes POWER hardware and software available to open development for the first time as well as making POWER intellectual property licensable to other manufacturers, greatly expanding the ecosystem of innovators on the platform. Suzhou PowerCore plans to license IBM's POWER architecture, intellectual property related to POWER8 and chip design tools to develop and market processors for servers in China. The Research Institute of Jiangsu Industrial Technology will promote and help build an ecosystem for POWER development in Jiangsu Province and throughout China.

Suzhou PowerCore recently was created as part of an information technology ecosystem development initiative by Jiangsu Province and is located in the Suzhou National New & Hi-Tech Industrial Development Zone. Suzhou PowerCore already is working closely with leading Chinese chip design teams.